Small northern New Mexico city postpones decision on data center moratorium

Elected officials in Raton, a northern New Mexico town of about 6,000 near the Colorado state line, voted Tuesday to delay a decision on a data center moratorium after signing a memorandum of understanding with a data center developer earlier this year.

The Raton City Commission in February voted 3-1 to approve a memorandum of understanding with Colorado-based Atterix LLC, which proposed to transform an old K-Mart into a data center. The preliminary agreement said developers would spend six months conducting a feasibility study before reporting back to the commission.

Matthew Bruff, a Colorado lawyer who filed paperwork to incorporate Atterix in December, told city leaders at the time that Raton provided “unique geographical advantages” — including the option to use fresh mountain air rather than water to cool servers — for a data hub that could help address internet latency along Interstate 25 from Albuquerque to Wyoming.

“This is not a large-scale AI data center,” Bruff said at the February meeting. “This is an infrastructure hub that helps reduce the latency to make some of those larger facilities more productive.”

Some pushed back during the meeting’s public comment period and raised concerns about water and electricity usage.

“The Southwestern part of the U.S. is in the biggest megadrought that this area has seen in 1,200 years,” Raton resident Pat Walsh said at the February meeting, adding that she was concerned about any potential strain on the area’s water resources as “I don’t think these centers create many jobs.”

About two weeks after the MOU decision, residents launched an online petition calling on commissioners to oppose local data center proposals. It’s since grown to nearly 400 signatures.

On Tuesday, commissioners were scheduled to vote on a temporary moratorium on issuing business licenses or zoning approvals to data center projects. They ultimately decided to postpone the vote as city staff had not yet conducted a legal review of the proposed moratorium and how it might impact the existing MOU with Atterix.

“It appears we’re doing a bait-and-switch in bad faith,” Mayor Pro Tem Mark Honeyfield said during Tuesday’s meeting. “We haven’t heard anything from this company regarding this feasibility study, so we don’t know where that’s gone or if it’s gone anywhere. We’re exposing ourselves to some liability here.”

Sally Anne Hoger, another commissioner, said city leaders did not intend for a moratorium to keep data centers out of their community. It was a necessary pause, she said, so the city could adopt necessary regulations and safeguards before seriously entertaining proposals on these developments.

Further south that same evening, elected officials in Socorro County unanimously approved a yearlong data center moratorium after residents and U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) urged them to do so.

Green Data CEO Jason Bak for months has proposed a data center and massive solar array in the ranching community and has said he plans to generate the “vast majority” of the project’s water by utilizing technology that pulls moisture from the air.

Last week, New Mexico Tech, the local university that had been operating in partnership with Bak’s company, announced it was halting the deal for the time being, partly because the university did not own enough contiguous land to host the development.