Data Center Feasibility Study in Colorado

A thin class with a high state rank

Colorado's data center record is small in count but notable in rank. The FY2017 to FY2026 file holds 32 SBA approvals for the class, worth $23.4 million in gross dollars, and the state sits 7 of 52 among states. Inside Colorado, data centers rank 22 of 39 among asset classes, so they are a minor part of the state's SBA lending even as the state is prominent for the class nationally. The location quotient of 1.28x confirms that Colorado leans toward the class more than the national book does. At $250,000 the median loan runs 1.22x the median nationally, a slightly larger ticket than elsewhere.

Program mix, loan sizes and counties

Half of the approvals fall between $150,000 and $750,725. By program, 31 loans sit under SBA 7(a) and a single one under SBA 504, and franchising is at 3.1%. These numbers describe loans of modest size. Denver County leads with 11 loans, El Paso has 6, Arapahoe 5, Boulder 4 and Douglas 3, with Jefferson, Montrose and Weld each recording one. No lender names are listed for this cell, so we make no statement about which banks serve the class here.

A limit on the code

The industry code behind this class is shared. SBA's records give a colocation building no category apart from hosting services, and the code is shared with firms whose business is data processing. A reader should therefore treat the 32 loans as a record of loans under a shared industry code. The counts are real, but they do not isolate the loans that financed a data hall.

Annual pattern and outcome rates

Approvals ran at 3 in FY2017, peaked at 5 in several years including FY2019, FY2022, FY2023 and FY2024, and fell to 1 in FY2026. That is a low-volume series. Neither outcome rate is published for Colorado data centers, since the cohorts are too thin to support a percentage; we give no number and we do not describe either as zero. Rates on other pages are floors, because open loans can still fail.

Power, tenants and cooling

Power comes first in any Colorado data center study: the capacity and price the local utility can deliver, redundancy options, and the lead time for new service. It then has to test demand honestly, separating committed tenants from hoped-for ones, and show how much of the facility is leased before construction debt is drawn. Cooling, connectivity and the seismic and weather exposure of the chosen county belong in the cost model. Coverage of the debt payments should be modelled on a slow lease-up with a downside for the loss of an anchor tenant. A typical SBA loan here sits near $250,000, so a project of institutional scale falls outside this record, and an appraiser will treat the building's value as tied to contracted income and not to equipment alone.