The Monument town council voted last week to place a six-month ban on new data center applications.

While no applicable projects have yet come to the town for approval, planning director Dan Ungerleider said the moratorium was a “proactive” way to give Monument time to consider how to regulate data centers in the future.

“This is really just a chance for us to take a step back,” he said.

A data center is a physical location for digital data storage and computing. With the rise of artificial intelligence, energy consumption by data centers in the U.S. is expected to double from 2025 to 2027, according to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Monument is the latest in a string of Colorado communities to pause data center development. On July 16, Woodland Park in neighboring Teller County approved an 18-month moratorium. Denver, Broomfield, Larimer County, Jefferson County and Boulder County have all adopted moratoriums of varying lengths this year.

Monument is the first municipality in El Paso County to approve a moratorium. To the south, an AI data center called Project Taurus is going through the Colorado Springs approval process, hoping to join several other operational facilities in the metro area.

According to the industry catalog Data Center Map, there are 57 facilities planned or built in Colorado, 45 of which can be found in the Denver area.

Monument Councilman Steve King said he had trouble seeing how a future data center would be a benefit to the town.

“If we open up the door and it goes badly, then that’s a huge problem,” he said.

Ungerleider said the six-month pause gives the town time to write rules on data centers into its land development code, which is due for an update.