For nearly 20 years, Tammy Higgins loved the view from her backyard: a working cattle ranch and sweeping prairie vistas stretching as far as the eye could see.
Now, that idyllic scene has been replaced by towering cranes and a sprawling construction site – a hive of non-stop activity that represents how the landscape of America’s least-populated state is changing.
‘It was very pastoral,’ Higgins told the Daily Mail. ‘We miss that view.’
The Wyoming native and her husband moved into their home on Red Hawk Drive, about seven miles south of the state Capitol building and nine miles north of the Colorado border, 19 years ago. Their hope was that Cheyenne’s slowly creeping growth would not reach the quiet neighborhood.
But around three years ago, they knew ‘something was happening’ when crews began clearing land and laying electrical and sewer lines behind their property.
Then, confirmation came last summer that the giant tech firm Meta had chosen Cheyenne as the location for an $800million data center – a boon for a city and state in need of fresh investment as traditional industries such as coal mining continue to decline.
Now there is a new road abutting Higgins’s lovingly tended back garden, along with a staging area for semitrailers and constant rumble of construction vehicles.
At 63, she is thankful for the trees she planted years ago, which will grow to help screen out the traffic and industrial view.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is undoubtedly transforming the landscape – and Wyoming officials hope that the change will extend to the state’s finances and future.
Long known for its agrarian and blue-collar industries, Wyoming has emerged as a desirable site for data centers. The surge in artificial intelligence has only accelerated that trend.
Giant tech firm Meta had chosen Cheyenne as the location for an $800million data center
Cranes and construction for Meta’s new $800million data center can be seen behind a nearby residential Cheyenne home in a neighborhood backing up to the site
Tammy Higgins, who has lived in her home on Red Hawk Drive for 19 years, has watched as a newly paved road was built behind her backyard – and it’s constantly filled with traffic
Microsoft was the first big name to arrive, opening its first Cheyenne data center in 2012 and adding two more in 2021. Other smaller facilities followed with a steady stream of new investment – then last year’s Meta announcement marked a major coup, bringing at least 1,000 jobs during peak construction and long-term employment for around 100 once operational.
One company specializing in data center construction is so confident in the state’s future that it’s opened an office in Cheyenne.
Jack Daniel Nix, ProLift Rigging’s regional sales manager, told the Daily Mail: ‘Wyoming is a great place for a few reasons: Number One, land is cheaper.
‘Number Two, the state itself gives a lot of tax breaks to those companies that want to come in and establish… and there’s cheap and available power in Wyoming to be had.’
ProLift not only constructs the centers themselves but also transports and stores the sensitive equipment housed in and needed to run them – and it is betting rising demand in the Cowboy State.
Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins says Wyoming’s lack of personal or corporate income tax, cheaper property taxes and land are major draws for data centers
Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins pointed to the city’s benefits, including no state income tax, no corporate tax and low property taxes.
‘We have the backbone of the internet right along the railroad tracks – goes right through the middle of Cheyenne,’ Collins told the Daily Mail, referring to the corridor along I-80.
‘So we have good latency. We can hook on to the national system.’
Then there’s the weather.
‘We don’t have any natural disaster,’ he said.
‘We don’t have hurricanes and things like that. We have a blizzard every once in a while but that helps you keep your data centers cool.’
Keeping data centers powered and cooled remains an ongoing global challenge but Wyoming is ahead of the game, experts say. The state already works to harness its plentiful natural resources such as wind and solar.
Daniel Cooley, a University of Wyoming energy economist, told the Daily Mail: ‘The more these data centers have to process and the bigger they end up getting, the more energy they require – and, simply put, there’s not a lot of excess capacity on the grid.
‘Wyoming, fortuitously, does have quite a bit of excess capacity – but other places don’t.
‘We have an awful lot of land, and I know a lot of people probably don’t want all of that land being used for power generation, but it is a benefit of being in Wyoming, specifically.
‘The kind of natural resource endowment of having a lot of wind, a lot of space to build out either renewable energy or nuclear power plants is really quite the boon.’
As more big players look to Wyoming for data centers, many are also planning to build their own local power infrastructure – a move that could reduce state energy requirements on the grid and also create a new type of ‘company town’.
Cooley cited a new data center in southwestern Wyoming – another area of the state highlighted by ProLift as a prime location – which is ‘considering building their own nuclear power station there so they can utilize that power and continue using and operating on that 100 per cent’.
Plans like that are ‘something that a lot of the data centers are increasingly looking at, not just so that they don’t burden the local infrastructure but because it also adds to some reliability,’ he added.
The Meta data center broke ground in 2024 and will employ 1,000 people during peak construction, then 100 long-term employees, the company says
Local watering hole Outlaw Saloon, one of the closest establishments to Meta’s new facility, has already seen new crowds of regulars from construction crews working at the site
‘So they don’t have to worry about blackouts on the grid because they supply their own power, which is something that’s very useful if you are dealing with a lot of data, and certainly dealing with AI – or a lot of data centers are also doing bitcoin mining.’
At the Meta facility, the first phase of which stretches across 960 acres, the company boasted that it is ‘working with local partners to meet our 100 per cent clean and renewable energy goal for the Cheyenne Data Center’.
It has pledged to ‘use cooling technology that is significantly more water efficient than the industry standard’, landscape with ‘native and drought-resistant vegetation’, manage rainwater on site, and incorporate ‘water-saving fixtures and technologies’.
University of Wyoming energy economist Daniel Cooley says data center campuses such as that being built by Hyperscale Prometheus, a rendering of which is pictured, are looking into building their own power infrastructure through sources like nuclear energy
The tech giant has partnered with the city, Laramie County Conservation District, and Wyoming Game and Fish Department to support local water projects – part of a wider push by state leaders to work with data center power players to keep pushing Wyoming forward.
Betsey Hale is CEO of Cheyenne LEADS, a private, not-for-profit corporation serving as the economic development entity for the City of Cheyenne and Laramie County. She told Cowboy State Daily earlier this year that Microsoft and other data center ‘companies collectively have invested $3.1billion in projects since 2012’.
The city worked closely with Microsoft to lure its business, offering land and a grant. The return on that public investment is $35.70 in tax revenue for each dollar expended, according to a study the city conducted, Hale said.
Once centers enter ‘operation and maintenance phase’, Cooley said, the direct ripple effect is smaller – but the ‘induced effects’ of new residents spending money in the local economy were still significant.
And that’s after the windfall already seen during construction, which is something that Cheyenne’s experiencing as hundreds of workers race to build the Meta facility.
The door won’t stop dinging at the local Loaf ‘n’ Jug gas station and convenience store a few minutes away from the construction site as a constant stream of hurried customers rushes in and out. One of the closest watering holes, Outlaw Saloon, began seeing a difference almost immediately when work began last summer.
Just after 3pm on a blistering hot Wednesday recently, a group of workers was already sitting out on the patio of the honky tonk venue, its interior filled with arcade machines, pool tables and a dance floor.
Microsoft and other companies ‘collectively have invested $3.1 billion in projects since 2012,’ Cheyenne LEADS CEO Betsey Hale said earlier this year
Bartender Misty Washburn, 38, hadn’t even heard about the Meta data center until she noticed an influx of new faces last summer.
‘These guys are regulars now,’ said Washburn, who has benefited from an uptick in tips.
‘Every now and then, we’ll get like three different companies that are all working out there come in after work.’
A cohort of her older regulars weren’t too thrilled about the construction and Cheyenne’s new data center destination status.
But she said: ‘We’ve got to kind of change with the times.’
Some developers are being savvy, honing in on the data center/AI trend, too – though there was no major housing explosion expected in the near future, said Garry Chadwick, president-elect of the Cheyenne Board of Realtors.
‘We’ve got a lot of high-end apartment complexes that have gone in with garages,’ Chadwick told the Daily Mail. ‘So they’re trying to anticipate that a lot of the tech-type guys aren’t looking to necessarily maintain a yard and take care of their homes. They want to just have it taken care of so they can do their traveling thing.’
While 100 long-term jobs from a data center may seem like a drop in the bucket in some regions, that needs to be put into context for Wyoming, where an estimated 70 per cent of college graduates leave and most don’t return.
The community college is really embracing the data centers, Chadwick said. ‘They’re trying to get the workforce that they’re going to need for these tech companies and tech jobs – so they’re adding some curriculum that will handle that.’
Mayor Collins believes that most residents are ‘excited’ and optimistic about what is happening in the community.
‘Some of these things that are going on are giving us some of the resources that we need to be able to make further improvements,’ he told the Daily Mail.
There are, of course, naysayers, particularly the people watching Meta go up all but in their back yard.
Bill Westerfield, whose home looks out over the Meta construction site, says he understands why Wyoming is attractive to data centers but isn’t a fan of backup alarms on trucks going off at 6.30 in the morning
Bill Westerfield, who lives across the street from Tammy Higgins on Red Hawk Drive, bought his house in 2017 to escape the constant noise from high school football games in his more heavily populated old neighborhood.
Now Westerfield, 75, is plagued by ‘backup alarms on trucks going off at 6.30 in the morning’, he told the Daily Mail.
‘I went to a program presented by Cheyenne LEADS at our church one evening, and they were just raving about all the development that was going in and how they were paying millions of dollars to help build infrastructure,’ he said.
‘And I was tempted to say: “Yeah, but we wouldn’t need the infrastructure if it [the development] wasn’t coming here.” But I didn’t.’
Mayor Collins rejects such criticism.
‘You’re either green or growing or you’re ripe and rotting,’ he said.
‘I think, right now, Cheyenne is growing not at a pace that’s unmanageable but in a steady way.
‘In a state where two-thirds of our kids choose to leave before they’re 30 and never come back, looking for opportunities to give them choices to be able to stay both here in Cheyenne and Wyoming is really important to us.
‘And we are really grateful that these companies are finding us and choosing to provide some of those jobs so that our children and grandchildren can choose to stay here.’
