Data centers are a rare opportunity for Wyoming

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On rare occasions, Wyoming is gifted with a great opportunity. The establishment of Yellowstone National Park as the first national park, Devils Tower as the first national monument, and Shoshone National Forest as the first national forest forever set us apart as a land of natural beauty and wonder. It also established Wyoming as an outdoor tourism mecca. Our tourism and outdoor recreation industries sprang from this opportunity and remain a key part of our economy today, well over 100 years later.  

The passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 also reformed Wyoming. Before the Clean Air Act, Wyoming’s Powder River Basin coal was relatively undesirable, as its ease of access was outweighed by its poor quality. However, our poor-quality coal burns far cleaner than the more efficient, but more sulfuric, Appalachian coal that dominated the market before. The passage of the Clean Air Act catapulted Wyoming into its position as a global leader in the coal industry.

Today, we may be facing another great opportunity, if we will only recognize it as such. Wyoming has quietly, but steadily, been establishing itself as a state with a promising future in computing and data. The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center outside Cheyenne is the first and most prominent example, and the recent influx in data center projects and proposals is the next step toward establishing an industry that may become a keystone for our state’s future.  

The rapid expansion in data centers is largely driven by the skyrocketing development of artificial intelligence. It is hard to overstate how expansive this growth has been. Estimates from 2025 showed that data center investment accounted for 92% of the United States’ gross domestic product growth in the first half of the year. Put simply, AI growth and associated data centers were the sole difference between American economic growth and stagnation in 2025.

The data center opportunity should not be taken lightly. These are major projects requiring massive investments that could prove very lucrative for our state. Estimates of property tax revenues from these projects can range in the tens to hundreds of millions per year per project. There is the potential for these projects to reinvigorate local governments and education funding. Furthermore, Wyoming is an especially attractive location for these projects. Large data centers require several things to be successful. Two of the most important are space and access to affordable energy.  Wyoming has both.

Wyoming’s history as an energy producer positions the state particularly well for this new industry. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of building data centers is finding a location that has the capacity to provide affordable energy. These projects require massive amounts of electricity, and many places simply lack the capacity to provide energy on the scale that data centers demand.

For Wyoming, one ancillary benefit of the rapid expansion of data centers is that the increase in energy demand may temper the decline in coal demand. Because of the need for large amounts of energy and the time it takes for new electricity generation to get off the ground, coal-burning power plants may see extended use or demand as this industry continues to grow. However, this only helps Wyoming if the data centers are located in places where Wyoming coal is used. Building these facilities overseas or in places with restrictions on coal generation does nothing to help Wyoming’s existing industries. Better to build them close to home than risk losing all benefit of the boom.

Data center investment is ready to come to Wyoming, as long as we do not stand in its way. Unfortunately, there are some who would do just that.  Some in the Legislature have proposed putting a moratorium on data center expansion. This is bad policy for Wyoming. Not only is it anti-free market, anti-business and anti-growth, it would essentially kill Wyoming’s opportunity to participate in the industry at all. This industry is expanding now. Building data center hubs is a current project, not one that we can pause and hope the world economy waits for us. This idea is tantamount to saying “no new coal mines” in the 1970s when the market was rapidly changing. Had we done that then, we would have missed out on a major industry and the billions of dollars of investment in Wyoming communities and families that came with it. Our policymakers should not be so shortsighted as to do the same here.