Why Cheyenne became a data center market
Cheyenne has four things that decide site selection and very little else that does. It is high and dry, which means a long free cooling season and low water demand from the cooling system. It has land, in quantity, immediately outside the city and inside one county's jurisdiction. Wyoming levies no corporate income tax and no personal income tax, and exempts qualifying data center equipment from sales tax. And it sits on the transcontinental fiber and rail corridor along Interstate 80, which is why the routes were already here before the buildings were.
What it does not have is a deep enterprise base. There is no local demand of the kind that built the colocation markets in Atlanta or Charlotte, because there is no local population to generate it. Cheyenne's data center industry was built by companies that came here to put their own machines somewhere cheap and cold, not by operators building halls to rent. That is the single most important fact about this market and it explains almost everything else on this page.
Denver is 100 miles south and is a genuine colocation market with its own page on this site. For most requirements that surface in Cheyenne, the honest answer is that the buyer is really choosing between a Wyoming self-build and Denver colocation, and those are different projects with different economics. Working out which one you are actually doing is worth an hour before anything else.
The power picture, and why it changes so fast here
Wyoming's grid is small. Statewide electricity consumption is modest enough that a single announced campus can be described, accurately, as a multiple of the whole state's current use. That is why every large project here arrives attached to its own generation rather than to a request for grid service, and why the numbers quoted in the press are often plant ratings rather than computing load. The table below carries the narrower figure and says which is which.
For a tenant that has one practical consequence worth more than all the headlines. A campus that builds its own generation is not waiting in an interconnection queue, which is genuinely faster, but it is waiting on turbine delivery, air permits and a construction schedule instead. Those slip too. Ask any operator here which of the two positions the building you are being offered is in, and ask what its power source is on the day you would move in rather than at full build-out.
Ask whether the space on offer is in a building that exists today. In a market where the announced pipeline is measured in gigawatts and the publicly registered building count is three, that question does more work here than anywhere else on this site. If the answer is that the building is coming, ask for the energization date, who is supplying the power, and what the operator's remedy is if the date moves. If the answer is that the building exists, the conversation becomes an ordinary one, and there are very few buildings for which that is true.
Three do. The permit layer is here through the federal air permit record for Wyoming, which is the layer that names the operator, and in this market it names one: three of the four filings we hold are Microsoft. The interconnection layer is here from PeeringDB, and every row links to the building's own public entry. The announced layer is here and is collected by hand. The fourth is not: our verified facility inventory does not extend to Wyoming, so there is no building count on this page rather than a zero pretending to be one. Note what the air permit layer cannot do. It records that a facility applied to emit, which in practice means generators and turbines, so it proves construction and names the builder, and it carries no capacity figure and no floor area at all.
What has been announced in Cheyenne and Laramie County
Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below links to a published report that states it, and was checked against at least one other independent report before it was written down.
| Capacity | Operator | Project | What was announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.8 GW | Google, with Tallgrass | Project Tembo, formerly Project Jade | A 716 acre campus at the Switchgrass Industrial Park, eight miles south of Cheyenne. Google owns it and will operate it, Tallgrass is building the gas-fired power hub beside it, and Related Digital leads construction. Crusoe, the original developer, left the project in spring 2026. It was announced in July 2025 as Project Jade at 1.8 GW, described then as able to scale to 10 GW, and Laramie County approved that plan in January 2026. Google has since cut it from five data center buildings to four and published no megawatt figure of its own. Black Hills Energy stated 1.8 GW in June 2026 and repeated it in its quarterly results on 5 August 2026, after the cut. Black Hills has said service begins in early 2028. Google has said part of the campus opens in the second half of 2028 and the full build finishes around the end of 2031. Data center capacity as stated by Black Hills Energy, the utility serving it, which is not the 2.7 GW of gas plant beside it |
The number most often attached to this market is 2.7 gigawatts, and it is the rating of the two natural gas plants Tallgrass would build beside the campus, not the campus itself. The data center figure is 1.8 GW, and that is what the table carries. Several outlets, including the reports that first named Google in July 2026, have applied the 2.7 to the data center as well, so a proposal quoting it is not necessarily wrong so much as quoting a plant. Three further limits. The 1.8 GW is the utility's figure for the load it expects to serve, not one Google has published, and Black Hills said in August 2026 that it was still working toward definitive agreements to serve it. This project has changed hands and name once already: Crusoe left in spring 2026, and Google told a public meeting in September 2026 that it owns the campus and will run it. And Microsoft, which is the only operator our permit record names in this market and has been building here for years, has published no megawatt figure at all, so its campus appears in the filings below and in no row above. The earliest service date anyone has published is 2028. None of this is leasable colocation. Read the reporting.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record below and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.
Who is actually plugged in across Cheyenne and Laramie County
A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain. Any building below can be looked up there by name.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Buildings listed | 3 | Registered in PeeringDB across Cheyenne and Laramie County, by 3 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 2 | 1 carries no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 7 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 0 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 0 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 57% | Lunavi - Cheyenne holds 4 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | Lunavi - Cheyenne | Lunavi, Inc. | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | Mountain West Technologies - Cheyenne | Mountain West Technologies Corporation | 0 | 0 |
From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.
What the public construction record shows, and who is in it
Four filings, four sites, and unusually for this site every one of them is identifiable. Three are Microsoft, filed under the company's own name, and one of those covers six buildings by number in a single application. The fourth is the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center on Veta Drive, which is a federally funded atmospheric research facility rather than anything a commercial tenant could buy into, and it is counted here because it is in the record and excluded from every conclusion below for the same reason. The largest project in this market, the campus in the table above, does not appear in these filings at all under a name we can match, which is a limit of the collection and not evidence that it is not being built.
Wyoming air permits, filed statewide and concentrated in the Cheyenne corridor. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Filings we track | 7 | Deduplicated. One source, which publishes no filing dates |
| Distinct addresses | 4 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Operators we can name | 1 | 6 of 7 filings name a recognizable operator. The rest name an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
| Filings with no date published | 7 | The source publishes the facility, not the filing date |
Operators appearing by name: Microsoft (6).
The filings on the record
| Filed | Named on the filing | What it says | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| No date published | Microsoft | Microsoft Cheyenne Data Center (Microsoft Corporation) | Power and cooling |
| No date published | Microsoft | Microsoft Cheyenne Data Center Cys13 & Cys14 (Microsoft Corp) | Power and cooling |
| No date published | Microsoft | Microsoft Cheyenne Data Center Cys17 - Cys22 (Microsoft Corp) | Power and cooling |
| No date published | Not an identifiable operator | Univ Corp Of Atmos Res Ncar Wy Supercomp | Power and cooling |
| No date published | Microsoft | Microsoft Cheyenne Data Center (Microsoft Corporation) | Power and cooling |
| No date published | Microsoft | Microsoft Cheyenne Data Center Cys13 & Cys14 (Microsoft Corp) | Power and cooling |
| No date published | Microsoft | Microsoft Cheyenne Data Center Cys17 - Cys22 (Microsoft Corp) | Power and cooling |
Collected from EPA ECHO air facility records for Wyoming. A permit or air-register entry documents a site or proposed work. It does not establish current construction or available space, and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.
Where the activity is, and what it means for a buyer
The Microsoft campuses
Our air permit record puts Microsoft at three locations: one on Logistics Drive in the north of the city, and two that the filings describe only by section and township in Laramie County. All of it is single tenant. Its relevance to a colocation buyer is indirect, and it is real: this is why the fiber, the substations and a construction workforce that has done this before exist here at all.
South of the city, toward the Colorado line
The greenfield ring, and where the largest announced campus is proposed. Land is available in quantity and in one county's jurisdiction, which is the reason projects of this scale can be approved here at all. None of it is leasable, and the earliest published service date for any of it is 2028.
The interconnection addresses in town
Three buildings in Cheyenne carry a PeeringDB entry and they are named with links in the table above. That is the entirety of the publicly registered interconnection in this market. If your requirement is network led, this is the set to test, and it is small enough to test completely in an afternoon.
Denver, 100 miles south
Not Cheyenne, and deliberately counted nowhere on this page. It is also, for a large share of requirements that begin with an interest in Wyoming, the market that will actually answer them. Cheaper land and no income tax do not help a tenant who needs a multi-tenant hall with staff able to reach it.
When Cheyenne is right, and when it is the wrong choice
Cheyenne is the right answer when you are building rather than buying. If your project is large enough to justify its own building, your workload tolerates distance from your people, and the tax treatment and cooling climate are worth real money at your scale, this is one of the strongest sites in the country and the presence of a hyperscaler here for years is evidence that the fundamentals hold.
It is the wrong choice for almost every ordinary colocation requirement. There is very little multi-tenant space, the interconnection ecosystem is three buildings, and the local labour pool for hands and eyes is thin. A requirement measured in cabinets, or one that needs staff on site regularly, will be better served in Denver and the comparison is not close.
It is also the wrong choice if you are buying on the strength of the announced pipeline. The largest project here has changed its lead developer and its name inside a year, its customer has never confirmed itself publicly, and it does not expect to serve anyone until 2028. That is not a criticism of the project. It is a statement about what a buyer can do with it today, which is nothing.
Establish first whether you are leasing or developing, because the two conversations share almost no terms. If you are leasing, ask which existing building, ask what power is energized in it now, and be prepared for the honest answer to be a small number. If you are developing, the questions are about the county rather than the landlord: what is entitled today, what the approval history on neighboring parcels looks like, and whether the power is grid service or self-build. In both cases ask about hands and eyes explicitly, including response times and after-hours cover, because remote hands is a genuine constraint in a market this size and it is cheaper to discover it now than in your first incident. And do not accept a proposal that quotes a gigawatt figure without asking whether it describes computing capacity or a power plant.