Wyoming’s AI Data Center Order Sets Off a Power Race

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon signed Executive Order 2026-03 on Wednesday, directing state agencies to attract AI data centers while protecting Wyoming’s water supply, power grid, and local communities from the costs of that growth. The five-page order, titled “Data Centers the Wyoming Way,” applies immediately to every executive-branch agency involved in permitting, reviewing, or regulating large computing facilities, and it arrived the same week Bloomberg reported that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are collectively projected to spend about $650 billion on data center infrastructure in 2026 alone.

The pressure on Wyoming’s grid was real before the signing. Trona mines, Bitcoin mining operators, and arriving tech companies are competing for megawatts that the state’s utilities have struggled to provision fast enough for existing industrial customers.

Gordon’s Data Center Framework

Gordon’s directive establishes a “Wyoming Data Center Development Framework” intended to keep the state competitive for investment while protecting ratepayers, natural resources, and communities. It doesn’t approve any specific project or set a development timeline; it tells agencies how to evaluate what’s arriving.

The framework requires state agencies to ensure:

• Developers pay all costs of grid upgrades and power procurement tied to their load, shielding residential and small-business customers from those bills
• Projects use cooling and water-management technologies suited to Wyoming’s semi-arid climate
• Permits are coordinated across agencies to reduce review friction for qualifying projects
• A workforce pipeline for advanced computing jobs targets Wyoming residents
• Communities receive meaningful public participation opportunities before and during development

State agencies now have 60 days to return policy recommendations and potential legislative actions to the governor. Wyoming already hosts 31 operating data centers, per Datacentermap.com’s Wyoming facility registry. County governments have been writing their own rules with uneven results. The Converse County Commission tried to create a special industrial park to fast-track a data center on private land this year; the state attorney general ordered the vote reversed because the county had no zoning system to support such a designation.

“We welcome investment, jobs and economic opportunity while protecting our communities, our natural resources and our citizens from unintended costs,” Gordon said.

The order came one day after President Donald Trump signed a separate executive order on June 2 on advanced AI innovation, cybersecurity, and national security review. Cheyenne’s city council had already voted down a one-year development moratorium 8-1, partly after union construction workers testified that data center wages were high enough to keep them in the community.

What Microsoft Is Building in Cheyenne

Microsoft has operated in Cheyenne since 2012 and currently runs 11 data centers across four campuses there, with three more under construction. In April, the company announced plans to purchase roughly 3,200 acres on the city’s south edge, about five square miles, which would triple its existing footprint. Weeks after that announcement, it added two more parcels totaling about 420 acres, including a 385-acre site east of College Drive and a 35-acre parcel south of Happy Jack Road.

The mechanism keeping those grid costs off other ratepayers is a Large Power Contract Service tariff in Microsoft’s agreement with Black Hills Energy, which requires the company to fund all grid upgrades, substation builds, and transmission extensions directly from its own budget. The tariff structure Microsoft uses with Black Hills Energy had over a decade of Cheyenne precedent before states like Wisconsin and North Carolina scrambled to enact cost-shifting legislation after residents there saw electricity bills rise from data center buildouts.

Jonathan Noble, a Microsoft senior director, told a community meeting last week that the company is working to ensure infrastructure costs don’t shift to other ratepayers. “We’re taking this responsibility to build out this infrastructure very seriously,” Noble said. State air quality permitting records show that Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality approved a modification in early April allowing Microsoft to install 30 natural gas-fired engines and two emergency diesel generators at its Logistics Drive campus, supplementing its primary grid supply. Meta has also expanded aggressively in the Cheyenne area; WyoFile reported that the combined scale of those expansions could eventually triple Wyoming’s total electrical demand.

Who Gets Cut Off When the Power Runs Short

Wyoming’s trona and soda ash industry generates more than $1.3 billion in annual exports and accounts for more than half the state’s global commodity trade. Representatives of that sector appeared before the Legislature’s Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee last month to make a direct case: when expansion opportunities arrive, there’s no power to take them. That constraint, which Wyoming’s legislative energy committee examined last month and WyoFile documented in its coverage, predates the current AI investment wave by years.

Seven years is a de facto no.

Jody Levin, a trona industry representative, said that to the legislature’s energy panel, arguing that current grid constraints put utilities seven years away from meeting additional industrial capacity requests. Rocky Mountain Power President Dick Garlish reinforced the concern from the utility side, warning the same committee that tech tenants whose plans fall through leave all other ratepayers absorbing the cost of generation built for customers who are gone.

Cheyenne residents had seen the pressure develop in real time. The city council heard from dozens of people about the pace of development, with concerns ranging from noise and air quality at existing Microsoft facilities to what the combined expansion footprint of Microsoft and Meta could eventually mean for the state’s total electricity consumption. Gordon’s order sets rules for how competing claims on that capacity get processed; it doesn’t change how much capacity exists.

The conflict extends beyond extractive industries. The Wyoming Business Council awarded a $50,000 grant to the Northern Arapaho Tribe’s government on the Wind River Indian Reservation to study the prospect of a large data center on tribal land, a move that generated significant opposition from the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, which shares the reservation. The state-level framework doesn’t resolve competing priorities between data center developers and existing stakeholders at the county or tribal level.

Bitcoin Miners and the Infrastructure Advantage

Power Contracts Without the Wait

The same grid shortage blocking trona expansion is a structural advantage for Bitcoin mining companies that already hold power contracts in Wyoming. CleanSpark announced in 2024 that it had executed 75 MW of power contracts and completed its first Wyoming site acquisition, a 30 MW facility expected to add more than 2 exahashes per second (EH/s, a unit measuring total computation committed to the Bitcoin network) to its hash rate. A second Wyoming site added 45 MW and approximately 3 EH/s of additional capacity.

Those power contracts, cooling systems, and grid connections are exactly what AI and high-performance computing (HPC, parallel computing clusters used for machine learning model training and inference) operators need, but face multi-year queue times to acquire from scratch. After the April 2024 Bitcoin halving cut block rewards in half, firms including IREN, MARA Holdings, Cipher Digital, Hut 8, HIVE Digital, and TeraWulf began marketing their existing power access and sites to AI customers willing to pay premium margins to avoid that wait. For a mining site with a working substation and power contract already in place, converting to HPC hosting sidesteps the queue entirely.

Wall Street’s New Label for Old Assets

Markets have repriced the conversion quickly. IREN Limited secured a Microsoft AI cloud partnership projected to generate $1.94 billion in annualized revenue at an 85% project-level EBITDA margin (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization; a measure of operating profitability), with a 4.5 GW power pipeline behind it. Cipher Digital, which rebranded from Cipher Mining after largely exiting Bitcoin operations, assembled a $9.3 billion contracted HPC backlog anchored by a 300 MW deal with Amazon Web Services. TeraWulf, after locking in $12.8 billion in AI-related contracts, now holds 510 MW of contracted HPC capacity.

CoinShares research, from the digital-asset analytics firm, estimates that cumulative AI and HPC contracts announced across publicly listed miners now exceed $70 billion. Bernstein analysts initiated coverage on TeraWulf and Cipher Digital as part of what they called an “emerging AI infra” watchlist, placing those companies in the same coverage universe as data center developers rather than alongside pure-play crypto producers.

Wyoming’s executive order doesn’t name Bitcoin miners. Its framework for large-load permitting, which covers any facility requiring significant grid access, applies equally to a miner converting an existing site to HPC hosting as to a hyperscaler starting from raw land.

Sixty Days, Then a Vote

State agencies have until early August to deliver policy recommendations and proposed legislative actions to Gordon. The Legislature’s Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee was meeting this week in Casper to continue deliberations on how utilities can meet rising demand without pushing costs onto homes and small businesses. That committee’s work feeds directly into whatever agencies put in front of the governor.

The first concrete project test arrives before that window closes. The Uinta County Planning Commission has already recommended approval of a large data center proposed by Prometheus Hypescale near Evanston in southwest Wyoming. The developer told local officials it plans to supply its own energy and avoid the local water supply. County commissioners are scheduled to vote on the proposal as early as June 16.