About 75 yards south of my back fence, across the tracks, our new neighbor is spending $1.2 billion on a 184,000-square-foot building on 115 acres.
It's so big, they're calling it “a campus.”
How do you welcome folks like that to the neighborhood?
A plate of cookies?
A bottle of wine?
But then, I don't think any of the neighbors were invited to the swell groundbreaking last week, attended by “Related Companies” executives, Gov. Mark Gordon, Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins, assorted other very important persons, and reporters. (The name Related Companies brings to mind “Six Companies,” the outfit that built a little project called Hoover Dam.)
We are told this project will generate “88 megawatts of data capacity for CoreWeave,” according to the Cowboy State Daily story last week., soon to be boosted to 302 megawatts.
There are about three things in that last sentence that I'd have to run by some young person to understand. We're told we need data centers on every corner these days to facilitate Artificial Intelligence, keeping up with the Chinese, and maintaining “the cloud.”
I don't know about you, but when I hear about “AI,” I think about Hal not letting Dave back into the spaceship in the movie “2001, A Space Odyssey.” Are you guys sure about this?)
We learned in the Cowboy State Daily story that over the next 15 years, the project will generate $250 million in tax revenues to Cheyenne and the state of Wyoming. Keep that in mind in case you're losing sleep over that property tax cut we got this year, worried sick that some taxing district somewhere might have to do without something. With all this development, and rising valuations, government is cutting a decidedly fat hog lately, if you ask me (which I notice you didn't).
Way back in my days of publishing small daily newspapers for the (wonderful) family that once owned the Casper Star-Tribune, we'd have given our eye teeth for a tiny fraction of the development that's going on all around us these days in Cheyenne. I served on a couple of “development committees,” with precious few victories (come to think of it, maybe none). So what's going on in Cheyenne today is something to behold, evidence that real estate really is all about “location, location, location.”
You drive around town these days and there are new buildings going up everywhere, including a couple more huge data centers, like the new one in our neighborhood, and the huge Microsoft one down the road. There are also smaller projects – new houses everywhere, a handful of new banks, a new auto service business, a new Tractor Supply, and a huge warehouse across from Sierra Trading Post.
(Still feeling guilty about your taxing districts going without?)
Related Companies officials assure Cheyenne that their new campus won't make our electric bills go up, and it will only use as much water as it takes to supply “six bathrooms.” That's all very good, but in my neighborhood, we're more concerned about noise.
That's because an outfit named Clean Spark put in seven units to “mine” digital currency earlier this year, at its site east of the Lowe's Distribution Center. That's just down the hill and across the tracks from our neighborhood. And when they got cranked up, the peace and quiet in our neighborhood was gone. We complained, Cowboy State Daily did a story, Mayor Collins got involved, and noise-deadening walls were erected. We're told they're operating at 40 percent of capacity, and there's a lawsuit with the supplier over the cooling equipment they're using.
Clean Spark officials say they want to be good neighbors, but folks in our area wonder why they started operating before solving the noise problem.
We're impressed that Mayor Collins has been addressing our complaints. That's something, considering that we're county residents who can't vote for him.
For now, the only noise we're noticing from Related Companies is the beeping of heavy earth-moving equipment backing up. No problem there. And if they operate quietly, like Microsoft's very big data center off Christensen Road – which doesn't make a peep - we'll get along just fine.
We'll see how it goes.
Guess I'll hold off for now on that welcome-to-the-neighborhood plate of cookies.
Dave Simpson can be reached at: DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
