Meta (Facebook) Formally Announces Massive $800M Data Center In Cheyenne

CHEYENNE — While Wyoming residents were going about their day-to-day lives in 2019, public officials and economic developers began working behind the scenes to bring a large Facebook data center to the Cowboy State.

That’s when the company now known as Meta — which owns social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and What’s App — first approached local officials about buying land south of town.

Fast-forward five years to Tuesday morning, when Project Cosmo was officially announced, an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot Meta data center in south Cheyenne. Meta says the project will support about 100 operational jobs and more than 1,000 skilled trade jobs at its peak of construction.

The facility is scheduled to open by 2027.

Cowboy State Daily first reported on Meta’s plans to build a data center in May.

A Facility For The Future

Bradley Davis, Meta’s director of data centers and economic development, said Cheyenne is the perfect home for a facility that will be optimized for artificial intelligence workloads as part of the infrastructure that helps support the mammoth company.

Along with Davis, at Tuesday’s press conference officially announcing the data center were U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, Gov. Mark Gordon, various state legislators and Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins.

Although a symbolic photo was taken with the officials holding Meta-branded white shovels, there was no official groundbreaking as construction on the massive facility had already begun months ago.

“Do we say we dig Meta here?” Gordon joked, bringing an audible groan from the audience.

Loose Lips Sink Chips

Officials had years ago signed nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to keep their mouths zipped about the 960-acre enterprise data center coming to Cheyenne’s newest business park along South Greeley Highway, called the High Plains Business Park.

Cheyenne area officials also have signed NDAs on other projects in the past involving Microsoft Corp. when it expanded to the Cheyenne Business Parkway area south of Interstate 80 near Campstool Road and the Burlington Trail.

The same for 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 just south of I-80.

Collins said it was particularly difficult keeping Project Cosmo secret for so long. He told Cowboy State Daily after the presentation that he has known about it since when he first became mayor in 2020.

“Anybody who knows me knows it’s been killing me not to be able to say,” Collins said in his speech. “I think my NDA is done now, right?”

The project is viewed as one of the largest high-tech investments ever made 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.

A $1.2 billion Enbridge Inc. solar project is planned near the data center that could supply it with power. The 1.2 million solar panels will produce enough electricity to run 771,000 homes, more than in all of Wyoming.

What Did It Take?

Davis said the official development agreement with the city and Meta wasn’t signed until a few months ago. This aligns with the timing of when construction began in mid-spring.

Under the agreement, Meta will pay to build many miles of new roads around the facility as well as install water and sewer lines.

“Those were some of the big lifts that had to be done,” Collins said. “That’s exactly what we asked for in our very first meeting.”

Cheyenne LEADS CEO Betsey Hale said she was involved in initial discussions when the company first reached out about the project. After that, the company did its own research on the potential property site, studying everything from the wind, sun and temperatures to nearby riparian habitats and wetlands.

Davis said there’s dozens of other factors Meta takes into consideration such as having a shovel-ready site, robust infrastructure, access to renewable energy, a deep and talented workforce for the construction of the operations facility, and willing community partners.

“I can tell you that folks from Cheyenne check the box on all fronts,” he said.

By summer 2022, Meta had narrowed its focus on Cheyenne, as its officials attended Cheyenne Frontier Days with local representatives at that time.

But Davis said it wasn’t until Meta signed the development agreement with the city that the project was officially given the green light.

Also part of the deal was the agreement that Meta wouldn’t use any more water than a standard business with 100 employees, which was a major concern for Collins.

“It showed they cared about our concerns and the environment from the very beginning,” he said.

Although many data centers rely on water to help keep their equipment cool, this is less of an issue in Cheyenne because of its relatively cool climate. Hale said the company will use a system comparable to a vehicle’s antifreeze to keep its computers cool.

Facebook officials on hand Tuesday were mum on how much electricity the massive facility will use. Data centers are notorious electricity consumers.

A Meta official said that information will be published in the company’s annual sustainability report.

In the 2023 report, the data center closest in size to Project Cosmo is a 900,000-square-foot data center in Odense, Denmark. This data center used 517,718 megawatts of energy in 2022.

To put that number in perspective, the entire city of Cheyenne runs on about 100-120 megawatts per day, or 36,500 to 43,800 per year.

According to Digitalinfra.com, Meta owns and operates 24 data centers globally and 20 in the U.S., covering 53 million square feet with an investment of nearly $30 billion. Project Cosmo would be one of the company’s smaller data centers. The largest in Altoona, Iowa, covers 5 million square feet.

Cheyenne, The Data Center Hub

Cheyenne already has a Microsoft data center and a few other data centers.

Cheyenne City Council member Pete Laybourn said it was the installation of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center that truly put the capital city on the map for high-tech investments like Project Cosmo.

“That’s what paved the way,” he said.

Although an Oregon company is building the facility, Hale stressed that local Wyoming residents will have a great opportunity to work at the data center because of new educational programs being offered in Wyoming.

“That’s sending people right into lifelong careers in these data centers,” Hale said.

‘Hell No’

Not everyone’s a fan, however.

A number of neighbors to the future data center Cowboy State Daily spoke with in May expressed concerns about the noise and traffic the facility will cause in their neighborhood.

“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 neighbor 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.

Collins said he understands these concerns but has faith that Meta will work with its neighbors.

Davis said the company has a longstanding policy to work with the communities they are in and will try to mitigate any issues as they arise.

“In all of our data centers, we’re committed to being a good neighbor, a member of the community and looking to make sure that whatever we’re doing in our operations are not going to be a disturbance to anybody nearby,” he said.

Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.