Two Towns Race to Annex a Data Center Residents Fought

Greeley and Windsor are racing to annex a Global AI data center that packed rooms in both towns have already told them to refuse. City and town officials want $11.8 million to $12.6 million a year in tax. Residents keep talking about water, power, wildlife, and a company that has already drawn stop-work orders on the same land.

The operator is a New York firm that calls itself the world’s first sovereign AI hyperscaler. It plans to run the Weld County campus with Nvidia hardware and Humain, the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s AI company. The prize is the old Carestream Health plant at 2000 Howard Smith Avenue W, between the two towns. The leash is water.

Packed Rooms Did Not Stop the Annexation Race

Windsor Mayor Julie Cline has said her town did not bring Global AI here. She has also said Windsor wants the site as much as Greeley does. Annexation, in her telling, is how a town that already sees houses in the facility’s line of sight keeps a hand on noise, roads, and water. Greeley Mayor Dale Hall has told residents the city is taking data-center worries seriously and has asked staff for safeguards.

Windsor’s position is that, regardless of how people feel about a data center, we want to be able to be in control of our destiny. We didn’t bring them here. But what we can do actually is make sure that our residents have the best protection.

Julie Cline, Mayor of Windsor

That protection pitch landed in rooms that were already full of the opposite view. Windsor’s town board packed a work session on Aug. 3, 2026, to talk about rewriting municipal code for data centers, and the people who got in spoke against allowing them in town. Greeley’s council heard the same heat when it moved toward a pre-annexation deal. Louise Wilson, a Greeley resident, warned the council it would disrupt wildlife for a data center and accused the city of saying one thing while doing another.

Cline’s case is still the one officials keep making. If the land stays in unincorporated Weld County, or if it goes to Greeley, Windsor’s own page says the town will have little or no authority over what gets built. The tax number is the public lure. Control is the private one.

Global AI, Humain and the Kodak Campus

Global AI bought three parcels totaling 438 acres for $15.6 million in late November 2025, after Windsor developer Martin Lind had paid $3.5 million for the Carestream site in February 2025. Kodak once employed about 3,000 people on this campus at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Carestream, the medical-imaging remnant, closed the plant in 2024 and put it up for sale.

THE CAMPUS ON PAPER

• First phase: Gut one of the two existing buildings and stand up 18 to 24 megawatts this year.
• Near-term add: Grow to 50 to 60 megawatts if the grid and on-site gear allow it.
• Ceiling: A potential 1 gigawatt, which would need new transmission or generation.
• Money: Investment sketched from $2 billion to $20 billion, depending on how far the site runs.

The company already runs a 32-megawatt plant in Endicott, New York, in old IBM buildings, and says that site holds the largest cluster of Nvidia GB300 chips in the state. Co-founder John E. Kelly III spent nearly 40 years at IBM and created Watson. CEO Sami Issa previously built a Mubadala-IBM joint venture and a cloud project with AMD. Humain, launched in May 2025 under Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, partnered with Global AI in 2025 to put compute in U.S. facilities. The Weld County pitch now folds that stack into a “sovereign AI” brand on a Kodak floor plate.

Global AI’s Colorado site promises more than 1,500 construction jobs and more than 200 permanent high-wage roles, plus property tax for schools and services. It also promises a small day-to-day crew and light traffic. Those are the figures officials cite when they talk about a long-term partner. They are also the figures that do not answer who occupies the racks, or how much of the 438 acres ever lights up.

Greeley Tied Water Service to a 2028 Deadline

Both towns have sent will-serve letters for water. Greeley’s letter carries an end date of March 2028, which the company’s lawyer, David Foster of Foster Graham Milstein & Calisher, LLP, has said matches Global AI’s plan to be inside Greeley by then. The draft deal in front of Greeley’s council goes further. If Global AI does not petition to annex by March 31, 2028, the city says it will cut the water.

WHO HOLDS THE HOSE

Greeley’s pre-annexation agreement on the Sept. 8 agenda is a special meeting at 6 p.m. in the City Council Chambers at City Center South, 1001 11th Avenue. Staff has said there will be no public comment and no public hearing on the resolution. Residents may sit in the room or watch on the city’s portal. They may not speak.

The company’s own FAQ says the plant will use a closed-loop cooling system that recirculates water after the first fill, with makeup of about 1 percent a year, “roughly the amount of water that fills a large backyard hot tub.” That is the line meant to kill the drought argument. It has not. Colorado spent the spring tightening lawn watering while this campus was still being sold as a site that could, if power appears, run toward 1 gigawatt. Closed-loop cooling can keep the daily draw small. It does not settle who gets the water right, or which town gets to condition it.

Great Western, and the Border Greeley Needed

Colorado will not let a city annex land it does not touch. Until August 2026, Greeley did not touch the Carestream property. Then the city took 325 acres of the Great Western Industrial Park, a Broe-managed tract east of Colorado 257, south of Eastman Park Drive, and west of Great Western Drive. The council zoned most of it high-intensity industrial. Broe’s Mark Savala told the council the Global AI plant is next door, not inside the annexation, and that the park wanted Greeley’s water portfolio, including a primary-employer water bank and 12,000 acre-feet of raw water credits.

Windsor had eyed that park for a decade and had sewer, streets, police, and fire in its pitch. Cline has said Windsor filed a letter of reconsideration asking Greeley to show the Great Western take actually met code. If that annexation comes apart, she has said, the Carestream land is not touching Greeley anymore, and the data center cannot follow it in.

Windsor currently has no jurisdiction while the plant sits in unincorporated Weld County. The town’s own project page is blunt about that. It sent a will-serve letter as part of the county’s review, and it says that letter is not a contract. Staff have met Global AI on cooling, annexation, and utilities. The Town Board has nothing on its docket to approve or kill the campus. Greeley’s August vote is what turned a neighbor into a border.

Three Stop-Work Orders on the Carestream Site

County inspectors have already treated this job as a problem, not a brochure. Global AI may renovate the old Carestream building. It may not install data-center infrastructure until the land-use permit is in hand. Weld County Planning Director David Eisenbraun said the company went past that line. The county issued three stop-work orders and described four actions outside the repair-only permit. Windsor resident Ken Brown told planning commissioners the company had not stayed inside county rules for the past nine months, and that several stop-work orders had not been met with compliance.

Foster would not walk through the settlement when Planning Commission Chair Michael Wailes asked, saying it was not relevant to the review criteria and that the applicant and the county had already resolved it. Global AI Chief Operating Officer Michael Cadigan, at the same Sept. 1, 2026, hearing, talked about staying inside the lines going forward.

Going forward, transparency will be extremely important to us. Assuming success in the next couple of weeks. We know what we are asked to do from a criteria standpoint. We know what the requirements are. We will not, in any way, color outside the lines. That’s not what we’re about.

Michael Cadigan, Chief Operating Officer, Global AI, Weld County Planning Commission, Sept. 1, 2026

On Sept. 4, 2026, a security contractor for Global AI photographed a staff photographer’s license plate from behind a fence at the site. Cadigan’s transparency line and that fence are now part of the same public record. So is the county’s own calendar change. Commissioners had a violation appeal on for Aug. 17, 2026, then pulled it, and moved the land-use hearing from Sept. 23 to Sept. 9.

https://x.com/weldgov/status/2089067231825068332

FROM KODAK FLOOR TO COUNTY HEARING

1. 2024: Carestream closes the Weld County plant and lists the property.
2. February 2025: Martin Lind’s side buys the site for $3.5 million.
3. Late November 2025: GlobalAI (Colorado), LLC closes on 438 acres for $15.6 million.
4. April 2026: Weld County puts data centers on a use-by-special-review track in industrial zones.
5. August 2026: Three stop-work orders, the Great Western annexation, and a pulled violation appeal.
6. Sept. 1, 2026: The planning commission hears USR26-0019.
7. Sept. 8, 2026: Greeley’s council takes up pre-annexation, with no public comment.
8. Sept. 9, 2026: County commissioners sit as the final land-use vote.

Brown’s point still hangs over that sequence. A company asking a county to trust its next set of drawings is the same company that had to settle construction citations on the building it already holds.

What Weld County Will Decide on Sept. 9

The application on the county’s notice board is GlobalAI (Colorado), LLC, seeking a use by special review permit for a data center in the I-1 light industrial zone, docket USR26-0019, as an amendment to an older site-plan file. Commissioners meet at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, in the Centennial Hearing Room at 1150 O Street in Greeley, with a remote option through the county site. They can approve the development or turn it down.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The applicant: GlobalAI (Colorado), LLC, on the former Carestream campus at 2000 Howard Smith Avenue W.
• The process: April 2026 code put I-1 data centers through use by special review, with a public hearing in front of the board.
• The water paper: Greeley and Windsor both sent will-serve letters; only Greeley’s letter expires in March 2028.
• The citations: Three stop-work orders were issued; Foster says the company and the county have a resolution on file.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Which town wins: No annexation of the data center itself has been filed, and Windsor’s challenge to Great Western is still a live objection.
• Who occupies the racks: Humain’s U.S. partnership is real; a signed occupancy plan for this Weld building has not been put on the table.
• The gigawatt case: 18 to 24 megawatts is the first-phase plan; 1 gigawatt still depends on generation and transmission that are not built.

Hall’s council can lock a water-for-annex bargain on Sept. 8 and still watch the county kill or condition the use on Sept. 9. Cline can lose the border fight and still be the closest mayor to the fence. The people who filled those rooms in August and early September do not get a microphone at the Greeley special meeting. They get a county hearing the next morning, on a docket written for land-use criteria, not for a show of hands.

On-Site Power and a Path Toward 1 Gigawatt

Eisenbraun has said Global AI is taking what Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association can already deliver, then looking at on-site generation for the rest. Xcel Energy is also in the park. The company’s Colorado page says behind-the-meter generation will cut grid demand at peak, and that Global AI will pay for electrical upgrades so ratepayers do not. Expansion toward 1 gigawatt would still need more transmission or more generation than the park has now. That is the part of the file that turns a reused Kodak box into a regional power customer.

Weld County’s April 2026 data-center code is the other constraint. It asks for a water showing under state law, a will-serve letter from the electric provider, and a 65 decibel C-scale noise cap at the property line. Backup generation under 50 megawatts can ride along as accessory gear. The code is how the county answers residents who wanted a ban. It is not a ban.

WHAT THE APRIL CODE ASKS FOR

• Water paper: Proof of supply under Colorado’s local-government water statute.
• Power paper: A will-serve letter from the electric provider before the use is granted.
• Noise: No data center above 65 dB(C) at any point on the property boundary, on top of the county’s existing A-weighted limits.
• Zone: In I-1, the use goes through special review instead of a quiet site-plan stamp.

Those rules will be the board’s checklist on Sept. 9. They will not decide whether Greeley’s water cutoff in 2028 is a planning tool or a trap, or whether Windsor’s reconsideration of Great Western actually breaks the border. They will not decide whether a closed-loop system that tops off like a hot tub is the right neighbor for houses Cline can already see from the site. They will decide if GlobalAI (Colorado), LLC gets to turn a repair permit into a data center on a Kodak campus that two towns now want to own, and that both towns’ residents have already said they do not.