In the late 1800s, Cheyenne grew so fast along the Union Pacific Railroad that people called it the “Magic City of the Plains.” Buildings seemed to appear overnight, like a scene springing up from a child’s pop-up book.
Things eventually slowed down, and the city wasn’t without its economic troubles.
A flood in 1985 caused $61 million in damages, leading to a touch of urban decay in a vital part of its downtown area, leaving structures like the Hynds Building and the historic Bell Building vacant — or nearly so — for decades.
About the same time, a new mall beckoned on the outskirts of the city, a touch of urban sprawl thrown into the mix.
Today, locals are starting to see yet another magic moment for growth in Cheyenne.
A construction boom has come together, seemingly overnight. Cranes here, construction crews there — all working on a mix of new developments that range from massive self-powered data centers like Project Jade to hotels, apartment complexes, new restaurants and more.
With huge data centers, business parks, and hotels moving forward at what seems lightning-like speed, Cheyenne is being reshaped by a building boom. But there’s nothing sudden about it — this boom has been 40 years in the making. Work is going fast and furious in south Cheyenne on the $800 million Meta data center. (CSD File) 
With huge data centers, business parks, and hotels moving forward at what seems lightning-like speed, Cheyenne is being reshaped by a building boom. But there’s nothing sudden about it — this boom has been 40 years in the making. Work is going fast and furious in south Cheyenne on the $800 million Meta data center. (CSD File) 
With huge data centers, business parks, and hotels moving forward at what seems lightning-like speed, Cheyenne is being reshaped by a building boom. But there’s nothing sudden about it — this boom has been 40 years in the making. After years of being vacant and deteriorating, the Hitching Post district in west Cheyenne is revitalized with new hotels. (CSD File)
Apartments And Data Centers And Hotels
Visit Cheyenne’s new CEO Jim Walter is among those taking note of all the construction that’s happening in his community.
“You drive down South Greeley Highway toward the Colorado State Line, and you’ve got the Meta data center that’s going in,” he said, referring to the $800 million, 750,000-square-foot Project Cosmo. “You’ve got Microsoft that’s been doing its work over the years. And you’ve got more (data centers) that are planned.”
There are new hotels, too, like the Everhome Suites built on the former site of the historic Hitching Post Inn that was destroyed by fire in 2010, and Home2 Suites by Hilton located on Lincolnway. These hotels opened in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
“We’ve got a brand-new Hampton Inn and Suites that’s opening up hopefully in the spring sometime,” Walter added. “And we’ve got a great project downtown on 19th Street, with the apartments that are going in kind of catty-corner from Black Tooth Brewing, which is going to put in nearly 100 new living spaces downtown for people.”
On the east edges of Cheyenne, two or three data center projects are moving along.
There have also been a number of new restaurants, breweries, and other businesses that have popped up recently as well, like Human Bean, Scooters, and the Westby Edge Brewing Co., to name a few.
“Cheyenne has never grown like this,” City Councilman Pete Laybourn told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s incredible. I represent Ward 1, and now Ward 1 stretches from the airport south to almost the Colorado line. I mean, that’s the Swan Ranch and the developments out there.”
The Horse Palace Swan Ranch is a $25 million, 30,000-square-foot facility that’s angling to capture Colorado tourists with an off-track betting establishment that includes a restaurant led by a celebrity chef, which also features live music every weekend.
The Swan Ranch area, Laybourn added, is where the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association would locate, if it ultimately decides to relocate its headquarters and Museum of the American Cowboy to Cheyenne.
A site has already been identified for the PRCA in the newly named Hitching Post Business District, which will lie between Little America Hotel & Resort and Swan Ranch.
With access to both Interstates 25 and 80, it will be wrapped up in the heart of a busy American crossroads, in a business district that’s envisioned as a year-round Western culture destination.
The Wyoming Legislature has already approved $15 million toward the move.
“I mean, it’s like, good heavens,” Laybourn said. “It’s a really amazing, exciting time here.”
A Success Story 40 Years In The Making
But the people behind the "Wizard of Oz" curtain who have helped orchestrate all this construction and development would push back on the idea things are happening overnight.
That’s just not how economic development gets done, Cheyenne LEADS CEO Betsey Hale told Cowboy State Daily.
“If you want economic and community development, you’ve got to work at it, you’ve got to stick in there,” she said. “I’d love to tell you that we started working with these data centers three years ago five years ago, but the state of Wyoming started working with data centers clear back in the early 2000s with the Business Council and Gov. (Matt) Mead and Gov. (Dave) Freudenthal.”
Cheyenne LEADS, meanwhile, started working to attract data centers all the way back to 1986.
Mayor Patrick Collins, meanwhile, remembers that there had always been longstanding optimism in Cheyenne that being the northern end of the Front Range meant economic opportunity was imminent any day.
“But it went pretty slow,” he said. “And you had the recessions in 2008, 2012. Every time I felt like we were getting some momentum, it seems like the economy kind of set us back a little bit.”
Cheyenne LEADS, Collins added, was started 40 years ago.
“We’re going to celebrate that this year,” he said. “The economic or business community, back in those days, they recognized that if Cheyenne is going to be green and growing, rather than ripe and rotting, we needed to make investments in ourselves.
No Shovel-Ready Sites
In the midst of several economic development efforts, a big opportunity cropped up, and it turned out Cheyenne wasn’t quite as ready for that as the city had thought.
“We had a chance to get the Walmart Distribution Center, the dry goods distribution center that’s down at I-25 and crossroads, where the Blue (Community) Event Center is, and we didn’t have any shovel-ready sites,” Hale said. “Walmart wanted to be at the intersection of I-25 and I-80.
“And one, we didn’t have an economic development organization; and two, we didn’t have any business parks or locations for them to go. We just had large tracts of agricultural land.”
What Cheyenne needed, a group of business and community leaders realized then, was a business park — place that had everything a business needed to set up shop.
“What was great was, at the time, Cheyenne Light, Fuel, and Power was also kind of on a growth trajectory, or on an opportunity to grow … and so (they) decided to help Cheyenne LEADS buy 1,100 acres,” Hale said. “Which is where we have Cheyenne Business Parkway.”
Funding the purchase of that land came from a public-private partnership which included what was then called a Progress and Prosperity campaign.
Private people agreed to donate a certain amount of money toward the purchase of a business park every year for four to five years. That raised $1.8 million to acquire land for a business park. After that, the city and Laramie County helped build out a road with funds from the Fifth Penny sales tax.
With huge data centers, business parks, and hotels moving forward at what seems lightning-like speed, Cheyenne is being reshaped by a building boom. But there’s nothing sudden about it — this boom has been 40 years in the making. The Horse Palace right off Interstate 80 is located to attract patrons from Cheyenne and Colorado. (CSD File) 
With huge data centers, business parks, and hotels moving forward at what seems lightning-like speed, Cheyenne is being reshaped by a building boom. But there’s nothing sudden about it — this boom has been 40 years in the making. The Horse Palace right off Interstate 80 is located to attract patrons from Cheyenne and Colorado. (CSD File) 
With huge data centers, business parks, and hotels moving forward at what seems lightning-like speed, Cheyenne is being reshaped by a building boom. But there’s nothing sudden about it — this boom has been 40 years in the making. After years of being vacant and deteriorating, the Hitching Post district in west Cheyenne is revitalized with new hotels. (CSD File) 
With huge data centers, business parks, and hotels moving forward at what seems lightning-like speed, Cheyenne is being reshaped by a building boom. But there’s nothing sudden about it — this boom has been 40 years in the making. After years of being vacant and deteriorating, the Hitching Post district in west Cheyenne is revitalized with new hotels. (CSD File)
That First Data Center Wasn’t Free Either
The new business park that resulted opened up with the Sierra Trading Post Distribution Center in 1992, and eventually was a sold-out show, with Lowe’s Distribution Center taking the last parcel in 2001.
The model worked so well, it was repeated for the North Range Business Park — another 600-acre field for economic development dreams, funded by a prosperity campaign.
The new business park is ultimately where the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) decided to locate its new supercomputer, which opened its doors in 2012.
Randy Bruns, who was Cheyenne’s economic developer at the time, has told Cowboy State Daily that he’s heard from many people that bringing a supercomputer to Wyoming was a “mission impossible.”
Wyoming wouldn’t be able to compete on such a high-tech stage, he was told by one expert after another.
“But not only could we do it, we could do it well enough that it was an agnostic decision,” he said. “It was based on capability.”
NCAR’s selection of Wyoming helped set the stage for the first really large data center to show up in Wyoming.
Microsoft opened its doors a short time after NCAR, followed by Meta, and now all the other data centers that have since come calling a decade or so later.
Those early data center announcements were years in the making, Hale said, even if they seemed to come out of the sudden blue to the public.
“None of this stuff happens overnight,” Hale said. “And it doesn’t happen unless everyone comes to the table, the people in the community who are the business leaders, and the people whose kids and grandkids are going to benefit from this future development.”
Fixing Trouble Spots
It’s not only new construction that’s happening Cheyenne. Old properties that have lingered with no means to fix them are also getting new life.
Nothing quite captures the emotional side of this boom for those living in Cheyenne than the story of the long-troubled Hynds Building and the adjacent vacant lot known as “the hole” or the burned up Hitching Post, an iconic place that was a lingering eyesore for almost two decades.
The Hynds Building has been mostly vacant since 1985 after a historic flood chased many businesses out of the downtown area.
A newly opened mall on Dell Range Boulevard, meanwhile, offered a new business district that fast became a magnet for commerce, further drawing businesses from the downtown district.
Both the Hynds and the Hitching Post properties lingered because the costs of either restoring them or of demolishing and building new just didn’t pencil out.
Developers couldn’t find a way to break even on these projects, much less do anything that would be profitable.
Cheyenne City Councilman Jeff White credits TIF districts for helping the city overcome that barrier, giving both the Hynds and the Hitching Post properties a new and vibrant future.
TIF stands for tax increment financing districts. They work by leveraging future increases to tax revenue in a blighted area — increases that would never happen but for the TIF — and putting those borrowed funds to work on the infrastructure needed to make the projects pencil out. It’s an answer to the chicken-egg prospect a blighted property represents.
“We’ve really looked outside the box, tried to be creative, tried to look at innovative solutions to solve some of the longest standing problems that we’ve had,” he said “And I think we’re starting to see the success of that. It just really took a group of folks who were determined to see it through, who were committed, and were never going to give up until we finally got there.
"And it seems like we’re really starting to solve some long-standing problems and that should be celebrated.”
The TIF, in all, will enable more than 200 new housing units to come online in the next two years or so, White added.
That’s much-needed housing for Cheyenne to accommodate the workforce to support a building boom that may seem like it happened overnight but has really been a story 40 years in the making.
Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
