Cheyenne Data Center Boom Brings High Tech and High Anxiety to the High Plains

Cheyenne data center opponents are scrambling to garner at least 2,700 valid petition signatures—10 percent of the city’s registered voters—by Aug. 2 to get a referendum on November’s ballot asking residents to adopt a 12-to-18-month pause on approving new server factories in Wyoming’s capital city.The petition drive was launched in the wake of the Cheyenne City Council’s 6–3 approval of a 3,460-acre annexation to accommodate Microsoft’s planned multi-year expansion southeast of the city despite overwhelming opposition from residents during a seven-hour public hearing on July 13.Microsoft, Cheyenne’s largest taxpayer, operates four data center campuses in the city. According to Cheyenne LEADS, the city’s economic development agency, 10 data center locations are active, five more are under construction, nine are in the planning pipeline, and more than 30 developers are at least preliminarily engaged in potentially building data centers there.The High Plains city of 66,000—Wyoming’s largest city—is rapidly becoming a high-tech artificial intelligence (AI) nexus and distribution hub. It sits astraddle rail lines, two interstate highways—including the quickly urbanizing 100-mile I-25 stretch south to Denver—and transcontinental fiber optic corridors with abundant natural gas for electricity, a cool climate, and state incentives for high-tech developers.Over the last two years, however, residents have grown increasingly uneasy with the rapid pace of data center development now manifesting in massive construction projects carving into the open, rolling grasslands that frame Cheyenne, citing concerns over water, loss of agricultural land, unanticipated impacts—such as an alleged March wastewater bacterium release from Meta’s 715,000-square-foot data center project—unease over emergent AI technologies, a perceived lack of transparency by city officials, and state statutes they say allow deep-pocket corporations to roll over small local governments.Cheyenne is not unusual. Opposition to data centers is mushrooming across the county despite President Donald Trump’s robust support for AI development as vital in ushering in “a golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance” in what he and administration officials say is an existential race with China.According to a March 2026 Pew Research poll, seven in 10 respondents nationwide do not want a data center in their community.Data Center Watch reports at least 75 data center projects totaling an estimated $130 billion in value were denied, tabled, or withdrawn by local governments in the first quarter of 2026. Local governments in at least 14 states, including Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, and Maryland, have introduced or placed moratoriums on data centers this year.Lawmakers in at least nine states during 2026 sessions, citing energy demands, pondered repeals of data center incentives, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, with Pennsylvania actually nixing them in June. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen signed a July 21 executive order pulling the state’s data center incentives. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s July 14 executive order made her the first governor to impose a statewide moratorium on data centers.This national angst is now stewing in deep red Wyoming, the country’s least populated state with its highest percentage of registered Republicans, where Trump won 2024’s election by 46 percentage points and where a hastily assembled petition drive by an ad hoc patchwork of residents is racing against time to do something they say their elected officials don’t want them to do: Vote to invite or reject more data centers in their city.