Wyoming’s Data Center Order Sorts Who Pays for Power

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon signed Executive Order 2026-03 on June 3, a five-page memo that tells large data-center developers to cover the power they add. The order never names Bitcoin miners, and it does not open a new permit window.

What it does is set a filter. Whoever wants Wyoming watts has to keep household rates still, keep water use down, and live with county hearings. Google, miners with live contracts, and Cheyenne’s water board have already started answering that test.

Gordon’s Order Tells Developers to Pay Their Own Power

The document is titled Data Centers the Wyoming Way. It creates a Wyoming Data Center Development Framework and binds state agencies that permit, review, regulate, or help large computing projects. It took effect the morning Gordon signed it. Agencies were told to send him policy ideas and possible bills within 60 days, a clock that ran to about Aug. 2.

Gordon tied the memo to a White House move from the day before. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 2 on advanced AI, cybersecurity, and national security review, and Wyoming’s text says data-center growth supports that policy. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend about $650 billion on AI and data-center plant in 2026, and Gordon wants a slice of that money on Wyoming’s terms.

As America races to build the infrastructure needed to support advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and our nation’s rapidly growing digital economy, Wyoming is uniquely positioned to lead. But we will do it the Wyoming way. We welcome investment, jobs, and economic opportunity while protecting our communities, our natural resources, and our citizens from unintended costs.

Gov. Mark Gordon, June 3, 2026 statement

Two days later he published an op-ed that made the cost shift plain. Residential and small-business customers, he wrote, would be insulated from rate hikes, with developers forced to bear all incremental infrastructure costs. He also said a well-built hall can keep water use below that of an average subdivision, and that local councils keep siting power.

Consultants who parsed the five pages called it a statement of expectations, not a new permitting program. It leaves existing statutes in place and tells agencies to apply eight principles when they already have a file on their desk. Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus called the memo mealy-mouthed and said power costs and water use should be written with the public at the table. John Burrows, energy and climate policy director at the Wyoming Outdoor Council, called it a good first step and said the test is whether it grows teeth.

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES IN SECTION 3

• Grid stewardship: Developers, not homes and small shops, pay the extra wires, plants, and upgrades their load requires.
• Water sustainability: Cooling has to fit a semi-arid climate and protect water quality.
• Wildlife and land: Habitats and open space stay in the review, not as an afterthought.
• Local control: Councils and county commissions keep siting and nuisance calls, with pressure for housing and local gifts.
• Workforce: The University of Wyoming and community colleges are named as training partners.
• Transparency: Agencies owe the public clear impact information and real meetings.
• Energy and security: Projects are framed as part of U.S. computing capacity and Wyoming’s role as an energy state.
• Tax take: Growth is supposed to show up in local government, schools, and services.

Those lines do not award a single megawatt. They tell staff how to talk about the ones already in the queue.

From the June Order to the September Room

The second-order effect showed up in public, not in a new statute. Six days after the signing, the builder on Wyoming’s largest planned campus stepped aside. By September, Google was selling that same site as a $17 billion job in a packed Cheyenne room.

HOW THE POWER FIGHT MOVED AFTER THE ORDER

1. June 2, 2026: Trump signs the federal AI order that Gordon’s memo cites as cover for more data halls.
2. June 3, 2026: Gordon signs the five-page Wyoming framework and starts the 60-day agency clock.
3. June 9, 2026: Crusoe says it has paused the Cheyenne campus at the request of its customer.
4. July 8, 2026: Google, through Jupiter Star Holdings, is named as the owner of the rebuilt project, now called Project Tembo.
5. Sept. 9, 2026: Eric Murray, Google’s land acquisition and development lead, tells a crowded Metropolitan Downtown room the campus is a $17 billion bet.
6. Sept. 10, 2026: The Laramie County Planning Commission approves a conditional-use permit for a two-story Google office beside the halls.

In that same stretch, Cheyenne’s water utility traced a rare bacterium in city wastewater to fill-and-flush work at Meta’s campus and cut off that kind of discharge. The order’s water chapter met a real pipe before agencies had even finished their 60-day memos.

The Grid Is Smaller Than One Google Campus

Wyoming still runs a coal-heavy system and sells power cheap. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2024 profile lists 10,846 megawatts of net summer capacity, 40.7 million megawatt-hours of generation, 17.2 million megawatt-hours of in-state retail sales, and an average price of 9.14 cents per kilowatt-hour, among the lowest in the country. The state makes far more electricity than it sells at home, which is why it has looked like open range to computing firms.

One campus now on the books would use a quarter of that summer fleet if it ever drew 2.7 gigawatts from the public grid. It will not, because the plan is to bring its own gas turbines. That is the order working as designed: the load can grow if the bill does not land on the residential meter.

STATE CAPACITY VERSUS THE CAMPUSES IN THE QUEUE

A 10-gigawatt build, the old ceiling floated for the Cheyenne site, would rival the entire 10,846-megawatt summer fleet. That is why off-grid gas, not a new state power plant paid by ratepayers, is the path of least resistance under Gordon’s own rule.

A $17 Billion Pitch in a Packed Cheyenne Room

Project Tembo sits about 700 acres and eight miles south of Cheyenne in Switchgrass Industrial Park, off U.S. 85, on ground that had been seasonal cattle grazing. It began as Project Jade, a Tallgrass and Crusoe plan that Laramie County approved in January as a 1.8-gigawatt campus that could grow toward 10 gigawatts. Crusoe, the AI builder with oilfield Bitcoin roots in northeast Wyoming, said on June 9 it had paused at the customer’s request. Tallgrass kept building the power side.

Google now owns the computing plan through Jupiter Star Holdings. Related Digital, already in Cheyenne, is leading development. Murray told the Sept. 9 crowd the whole package is a $17 billion investment. He said mass grading could start later in 2026, vertical work in 2027, some halls in the second half of 2028, and full buildout in the first half of 2031, with about 2,500 workers at peak construction. The current site plan has four data halls, logistics and network buildings, and a two-story office Google calls HUB-1, which the planning commission cleared on Sept. 10.

Joey Terrano, Google’s water supply and infrastructure lead, said the halls would use air-cooled, closed-loop gear that would not consume or evaporate process water to cool servers. He put domestic and safety use, restrooms, kitchens, maintenance, fire suppression, at 20 to 30 million gallons a year. Earlier Jade filings had talked about the deep Lance Formation aquifer and lined ponds. Google is now selling dry cooling as the answer to the order’s water chapter.

The electrons are supposed to come from Tallgrass’s Cheyenne Power Hub, a gas complex of more than $7 billion next to the halls. Phase 1 is built around two Mitsubishi M501 JAC turbines for about 1,150 megawatts, with a path to 2.7 gigawatts. Black Hills Energy has said it is in on long-lead gear and had already posted more than $200 million in refundable construction aid, with service aimed at early 2028. That is a private plant for a private load, which is how a 2.7-gigawatt customer tries to stay inside Gordon’s ratepayer line. It is also the model critics of gas-fired AI campuses say may not age well if fuel, turbines, or carbon rules move.

CleanSpark Beat a Hyperscaler to 100 MW

Bitcoin miners got to Wyoming first because the state had cheap power, open land, and a friendly digital-asset statute book. They are the unnamed incumbents in an order about AI halls. CleanSpark bought two Wyoming mining sites with 75 MW of available power, with room to add 55 MW, then later described a 100 MW Cheyenne position as a win over a much larger computing buyer.

Matt Schultz, CleanSpark’s chief executive, said the firm could stand up a 100-megawatt mining hall in about six months, while a full AI data center takes three to six years. On an earnings call he said Wyoming wanted those megawatts energized today, not in three years, and that is why CleanSpark beat a hyperscaler to the contract. He has described the business as monetizing megawatts: mine first, then convert selected sites to high-performance computing where fiber and tenants show up.

When we secured the 100 megawatts in Wyoming, we actually beat out a hyperscaler because of the fact Wyoming wanted to energize those megawatts today and not in three years.

Matt Schultz, CEO, CleanSpark, fiscal 2025 earnings call

That speed is the other half of Gordon’s filter. A hyperscale campus that needs new gas turbines, county rezones, and a 2028 in-service date can still win if it pays its own freight, which is Google’s bet. A miner that will take interruptible load this quarter wins the leftover grid power that utilities want on the system now. After the 2024 halving, IREN, MARA Holdings, Cipher, Hut 8, HIVE Digital, and TeraWulf have all shopped AI or HPC hosting on the same kind of contracted watts. Bernstein has even started covering some of those names as power-backed infrastructure, not only as coin producers.

Gordon’s memo does not hand them a preference. It just raises the cost of being slow and of shoving new wires onto the residential bill, which is the race miners have been running for years.

Cheyenne’s Water Board Shut the Discharge Valve

The loudest local fight is not hashrate. It is water, and a lot of the online version of the story treated a wastewater incident as if taps had been poisoned. Cheyenne’s Board of Public Utilities did not say that. It said a rare bacterium, Cupriavidus gilardii, showed up in the city’s wastewater and reuse-irrigation system, which waters parks and fields, not the drinking supply.

Staff saw odd white colonies in January, and the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory named the bug on Feb. 23. Sampling in March at a predischarge tank on Meta’s Cheyenne campus, built in High Plains Business Park under the working name Project Cosmo, came back positive. Goat Systems, the Meta construction entity, and contractor Fortis were in the chain. BOPU said 801,475 gallons moved through the system in January, February, and March. Discharge privileges for those fill-and-flush operations ended March 24. The reuse system was drained, cleaned, and restarted June 29 after talks with Laramie County Public Health.

WHAT CHEYENNE’S UTILITY DID AFTER THE BACTERIA FIND

• The cutoff: Meta’s campus lost industrial discharge rights for closed-loop fill-and-flush water on March 24.
• The new rule: BOPU barred wastewater discharges from data centers that use closed-loop cooling and fill-and-flush systems.
• The fine: A $10,000 pollution citation went out; Meta asked for a hearing and a refund and said tests did not show the bacterium.
• The reuse system: Irrigation from reclaimed water paused, then returned June 29 after disinfection.

BOPU later said there was a low risk to public health and that it skipped an early public notice to avoid panic, a choice that fed the rumor mill. Meta said it backed Fortis in talks with the city and that Fortis stopped the discharge and began hauling water offsite once the board flagged a substance in wastewater, not in drinking water. Gordon’s order had asked for cooling that fits a dry state. Cheyenne answered with a ban on a specific construction dump into city pipes, which is a harder edge than the five-page memo.

Who Gets the Next Megawatt in Laramie County

Local government is still the real permit desk. Cheyenne’s city council rejected a one-year pause on new data centers by an 8-1 vote on May 26 and 27 after long public comment, weeks before Gordon signed. In late June the council advanced a 3,500-acre annexation of Lummis family land aimed at Microsoft’s Highlands build, along with other zone changes, while a fresh delay effort failed again. Microsoft has been shopping about 3,200 acres. Planning staff had also flagged zoning tied to that expansion.

South of town, Vantage won a Sept. 5 zone change for Project Latigo, a 480-megawatt plan on 1,835 acres along Terry Ranch Road, about 12 miles from Cheyenne. Tim Denenberg, Vantage’s market development director, told commissioners the firm wants Wyoming gas and closed-loop cooling, with construction hoped for 2027 through 2030 and talk of up to $20 billion and 2,000 jobs if the rest of the permits land. The Public Service Commission, meanwhile, has been writing rules for non-utility generators that would sell power to one customer, the legal box around plants like Tallgrass’s hub, and it held a hearing on Aug. 5.

That is not in Executive Order 2026-03, because the order was never the allocation. The allocation is already happening in county rooms, utility tariffs, and construction schedules. Google is buying its way through the ratepayer test with on-site gas and a $17 billion pitch. CleanSpark already took 100 MW by being ready to turn the load on. Cheyenne’s water board showed that a reuse-system scare can close a pipe even when the governor is still talking about subdivisions. The next megawatt in Laramie County will go to the party that can pay for it, cool it without another 801,475-gallon surprise, and show up before the three-year AI build calendar runs out.