EXCLUSIVE: Meta Coming To Cheyenne; Multibillion-Dollar Data Center Planned

CHEYENNE — The secret is out.

Social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. — billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s conglomerate that owns social networking sites Facebook, Instagram, What’sApp and other platforms — is building what could become the largest high-tech project in Wyoming in south Cheyenne.

When construction on its sprawling enterprise data center is completed in three years, it could become the largest multibillion-dollar investment ever in a single high-tech project in the Cowboy State.

Meta has targeted Wyoming because of the cool weather that’ll keep its super-heated enterprise system chilled a few degrees cooler than what is typical with water systems and proximity to a major high-speed internet trunk line that runs alongside a rail track in southern Wyoming from one side of the state to the other.

The social media company also has taken an eye to the business-friendly climate of the Cowboy State that gives sales tax exemptions for certain-sized data centers, according to several business and government officials interviewed by Cowboy State Daily.

These officials have signed nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs, to keep their mouths zipped about the huge enterprise data center coming to Cheyenne’s newest business park along South Greeley Highway, called the High Plains Business Park, which takes up roughly 1,300 acres overall.

Construction on the Meta complex recently began on the west side of the highway on 945 acres that the company bought last year near the permanently closed Intermountain Speedway, with work on a competing Microsoft data center happening on the east side.

Neighbors Not Fans

While those in the know are silent under the restrictions of their NDAs, the people who live in the Bison Crossing subdivision near the southern edge of the project are talking.

“It’s Meta,” said an elderly lady who was carting her trash out to the front of her house at 1436 Dayshia Lane about the huge project happening just beyond her property.

“There’s going to be a whole bunch of cars coming here from Colorado to work,” said the lady, who complained about the nonstop rumbling from heavy earth moving equipment coming from behind her house. “Today, it’s real bad.”

“It’s Meta,” said Bruce Riter, a tradesman in the construction industry who lives with his wife Rachel along Redhawk Drive in the Bison Crossing neighborhood.

Riter said that he was told about his new corporate neighbor by construction industry sources who bid on parts of the multibillion-dollar deal to build the first phase of the 800,000-square-foot Meta facility.

Other phases are expected to triple the size of the center in coming years.

“Oh, hell no, we don’t want it here. We bought our house 18 years ago and we could look out the back of our house into somebody else’s backyard, where cattle grazed,” said Rachel Riter of the grasslands that once grew behind her home as far as the eye could see.

“Nobody is happy about it,” she added.

“For 18 years we could look out at nothing from our hot tub, and now it’s going to be an industrial park,” Bruce Riter said, adding he’s not much of a fan of Meta’s social media platforms. “I don’t like what it does to kids or society. I’m not a Luddite, but …”

Biggest High-Tech Project

The construction project is viewed as one of the biggest high-tech investments ever in the Cowboy State, and is widely considered one of the reasons why the nation’s largest energy companies are building sprawling solar farms nearby along the highway leading south to Colorado along South Greeley Highway.

An enterprise data center is a data center that is owned and operated by a single organization to support its information technology needs. The facility contains physical infrastructure such as servers, racks and network systems that process internal data.

Meta, the backer of the project, began snooping around the area more than six years ago.

Economic development officials in the region refer to the project as “Project Cosmo,” which is run by a mysterious limited liability company formed with the state called Goat Systems Inc.

Goat Systems has hired Oregon-based Fortis Construction Inc. as the general contractor for the project, which recruited other workforce tradesmen to help.

Fortis is in the business of working on secretive projects, like the Meta one.

These projects can range from building a nanotechnology center in Oregon to make high-tech things for Japanese conglomerate Hitachi Ltd., to building a manufacturing facility for synthetic DNA products for California-based Twist Bioscience Corp.

Meta spokesman Ryan Moore was not immediately available to comment on the company’s plans to open an enterprise data center in Cheyenne.

New Signage

On Cheyenne’s southside, there’s a newly installed wooden sign off South Greeley Highway that points to 1800 High Plains Road, where Fortis began setting up a perimeter of fencing in some spots to keep snoopy people out of the area.

Until a few weeks ago, there was no High Plains Road. The old Speedway Drive turnoff from the highway has disappeared.

The plan is to eventually extend the new city-owned High Plains Road 5 miles to the west and hook it up with the High Plains Road exit off Interstate 25, where the Southeast Wyoming Welcome Center is located.

“That’ll take 10 years to eventually do,” said Betsey Hale, chief executive officer for the Cheyenne-Laramie County Corp. for Economic Development (LEADS), who is familiar with the project.

Fortis is said to employ roughly 800 workers on the project at the business park.

Just after the sun rose at 6 a.m. Thursday, a steady stream of white trucks with Fortis signage and Oregon license plates were seen driving back to the new business park where earthmovers and scrapers were digging up the land beyond the recently closed Intermountain Speedway.

During construction, Fortis plans to take over some of the speedway, which Coldwell Banker says is for sale at $2.1 million or for lease at 30 cents a square foot, to store some of its trucks, equipment and other material as a staging area for the massive project, according to economic development officials and a commercial broker knowledgeable about the racetrack property.

Meanwhile, Fortis and its small army of contractors have begun ripping up the grasslands to make way for Meta’s 945-acre first phase of construction.

High Plains Road that enters from the South Greeley Highway will initially bend south and connect with Parsley Drive off Terry Ranch Road, which connects with the I-25 exit to the east where fireworks stores are located near the Colorado border.

NDAs All Around

Everyone ranging from Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins and Laramie County Commissioner Gunnar Malm to Bailey Wheeler, a commercial broker with Coldwell Banker in Cheyenne, and Hale are keeping mum about the secretive project in south Cheyenne.

“I think it’s just one of those things that we can’t discuss until there’s public knowledge,” Wheeler told Cowboy State Daily.

LEADS owns and runs several business parks in the Cheyenne area, including the High Plains Business Park.

A press conference is planned for early July to announce the mystery and officially identify the enterprise data company, Collins told Cowboy State Daily.

Keeping secrets on business deals are not new for Cheyenne officials.

They’ve been to this rodeo before.

In recent years, Cheyenne area officials signed NDAs on projects involving Microsoft Corp. when it expanded to the Cheyenne Business Parkway area south of Interstate 80 near Campstool Road and the Burlington Trail; and with the North Range Business Park with 400 acres that Cheyenne recently annexed from Laramie County near the Dyno Nobel fertilizer plant on the city’s western edge, located just south of I-80.

LEADS and government officials dubbed the Cheyenne Business Parkway expansion as “the Bronco Philly Project,” which was a reference to Microsoft’s plans to build data centers in this eastern outskirt of Cheyenne.

Before the wraps were taken off, Microsoft’s plans to build more data centers in the North Range Business Park were called “Project Equality.”

Microsoft also has data centers in three other LEADS-run business parks encircling Cheyenne.

“This has been great for a community that hasn’t been historically reliant on the minerals industry like other counties in Wyoming,” Malm told Cowboy State Daily. “We’ve carved out a niche community in the tech sector.”

Collins said that because the smaller 400-acre parcel adjacent to the North Range Business Park was annexed by the city, the next step is to annex the adjoining North Range Business Park. The move is seen as a benefit to business park tenants because of a huge discount they’ll receive on water and sewer rates, he said.

Going For The Gold

Annexation new industries into the city isn’t new for Cheyenne. Last year, the city brought the High Plains Business Park into its fold, a sure tax revenue benefit for the city as well.

But that could become the farthest edge of the city to the south.

“I don’t see the city really going beyond Chalk Bluff Road. I’d be surprised if we’d even go beyond south of Terry Branch Road,” said Collins, who cited the high expense of delivering sewer and water through the rolling hills and tough terrain beyond the High Plains area.

With the massive data centers now rooted in the region, Cheyenne sees a need for more power production to be dispatched over its electrical grid.

The energy-guzzling centers in the region are expected to triple the electricity consumption to more than 1,000 megawatts annually in the next five years, said Collins, citing utility forecasts.

“The fastest growth is happening in Cheyenne,” he said.

Customers For Wind, Solar

Another underlying trend factoring into luring data centers to the region are clean energy supplies for the data centers, considered a marketing selling point for the huge corporations that own them.

Canada’s Enbridge Inc. is in the beginning stages of getting permits to build a $1.2 billion solar project capable of generating up to 800 megawatts of electricity and considered the largest in Wyoming.

That project will blanket the hilly grasslands to the east of South Greeley Highway with 1.2 million solar panels. Enbridge has stated that it wants to sell some of the electricity to super-sized data centers in the area, but won’t name any until it has a contract in hand.

The deal to sell the power is likely with Black Hills Energy, the Wyoming provider of electricity and natural gas for South Dakota-based Black Hills Corp., which has a power substation in the area, and which in turn would sell the power to data centers located along the South Greeley Highway corridor.

Another power provider is located on the western side of South Greeley Highway near the intersection of Chalk Bluff Road, where a 150 MW solar farm was recently built.

In September, that operation was bought by Atlanta-based Southern Co. from QCells USA Corp. The acquisition is the 30th solar project for Southern, but its first in Wyoming.

The project is scheduled to begin supplying electricity to Black Hills soon.

Hale said that the region is exploding with growth and the power requirements are substantial. Taken together, seven data centers have located in LEADS-owned business parks and provided $20 million in sales taxes paid on power, and more than $2.4 billion in capital investment since they were opened several years ago.

“We’re seeing a lot of energy companies contacting us, ranging from micronuclear reactors to hydrogen and natural gas plants,” she said. “There’s lots of stuff going on. I’ve been around 40 years. None of these parks have been built overnight.”

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.