Wyoming
EXCLUSIVE: Meta Coming To Cheyenne; Multibillion-Dollar Data Center Planned
CHEYENNE — The secret is out.
Social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. — billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s conglomerate that owns social networking sites Facebook, Instagram, What’sApp and other platforms — is building what could become the largest high-tech project in Wyoming in south Cheyenne.
When construction on its sprawling enterprise data center is completed in three years, it could become the largest multibillion-dollar investment ever in a single high-tech project in the Cowboy State.
Meta has targeted Wyoming because of the cool weather that’ll keep its super-heated enterprise system chilled a few degrees cooler than what is typical with water systems and proximity to a major high-speed internet trunk line that runs alongside a rail track in southern Wyoming from one side of the state to the other.
The social media company also has taken an eye to the business-friendly climate of the Cowboy State that gives sales tax exemptions for certain-sized data centers, according to several business and government officials interviewed by Cowboy State Daily.
These officials have signed nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs, to keep their mouths zipped about the huge enterprise data center coming to Cheyenne’s newest business park along South Greeley Highway, called the High Plains Business Park, which takes up roughly 1,300 acres overall.
Construction on the Meta complex recently began on the west side of the highway on 945 acres that the company bought last year near the permanently closed Intermountain Speedway, with work on a competing Microsoft data center happening on the east side.
Neighbors Not Fans
While those in the know are silent under the restrictions of their NDAs, the people who live in the Bison Crossing subdivision near the southern edge of the project are talking.
“It’s Meta,” said an elderly lady who was carting her trash out to the front of her house at 1436 Dayshia Lane about the huge project happening just beyond her property.
“There’s going to be a whole bunch of cars coming here from Colorado to work,” said the lady, who complained about the nonstop rumbling from heavy earth moving equipment coming from behind her house. “Today, it’s real bad.”
“It’s Meta,” said Bruce Riter, a tradesman in the construction industry who lives with his wife Rachel along Redhawk Drive in the Bison Crossing neighborhood.
Riter said that he was told about his new corporate neighbor by construction industry sources who bid on parts of the multibillion-dollar deal to build the first phase of the 800,000-square-foot Meta facility.
Other phases are expected to triple the size of the center in coming years.
“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 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.
“For 18 years we could look out at nothing from our hot tub, and now it’s going to be an industrial park,” Bruce Riter said, adding he’s not much of a fan of Meta’s social media platforms. “I don’t like what it does to kids or society. I’m not a Luddite, but …”
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Looking north from the Bison Crossing neighborhood located south of the New High Plains Business Park, earthmoving equipment began scraping the land on over 900 acres to make way for a new Meta-backed enterprise data center that could be one of the largest ever high-technology investments in Wyoming. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) -
Looking north from the Bison Crossing neighborhood located south of the New High Plains Business Park, earthmoving equipment began scraping the land on over 900 acres to make way for a new Meta-backed enterprise data center that could be one of the largest ever high-technology investments in Wyoming. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily) -
Looking north from the Bison Crossing neighborhood located south of the New High Plains Business Park, earthmoving equipment began scraping the land on over 900 acres to make way for a new Meta-backed enterprise data center that could be one of the largest ever high-technology investments in Wyoming. (Matt Idler for Cowboy State Daily)
Biggest High-Tech Project
The construction project is viewed as one of the biggest high-tech investments ever 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.
An enterprise data center is a data center that is owned and operated by a single organization to support its information technology needs. The facility contains physical infrastructure such as servers, racks and network systems that process internal data.
Meta, the backer of the project, began snooping around the area more than six years ago.
Economic development officials in the region refer to the project as “Project Cosmo,” which is run by a mysterious limited liability company formed with the state called Goat Systems Inc.
Goat Systems has hired Oregon-based Fortis Construction Inc. as the general contractor for the project, which recruited other workforce tradesmen to help.
Fortis is in the business of working on secretive projects, like the Meta one.
These projects can range from building a nanotechnology center in Oregon to make high-tech things for Japanese conglomerate Hitachi Ltd., to building a manufacturing facility for synthetic DNA products for California-based Twist Bioscience Corp.
Meta spokesman Ryan Moore was not immediately available to comment on the company’s plans to open an enterprise data center in Cheyenne.
New Signage
On Cheyenne’s southside, there’s a newly installed wooden sign off South Greeley Highway that points to 1800 High Plains Road, where Fortis began setting up a perimeter of fencing in some spots to keep snoopy people out of the area.
Until a few weeks ago, there was no High Plains Road. The old Speedway Drive turnoff from the highway has disappeared.
The plan is to eventually extend the new city-owned High Plains Road 5 miles to the west and hook it up with the High Plains Road exit off Interstate 25, where the Southeast Wyoming Welcome Center is located.
“That’ll take 10 years to eventually do,” said Betsey Hale, chief executive officer for the Cheyenne-Laramie County Corp. for Economic Development (LEADS), who is familiar with the project.
Fortis is said to employ roughly 800 workers on the project at the business park.
Just after the sun rose at 6 a.m. Thursday, a steady stream of white trucks with Fortis signage and Oregon license plates were seen driving back to the new business park where earthmovers and scrapers were digging up the land beyond the recently closed Intermountain Speedway.
During construction, Fortis plans to take over some of the speedway, which Coldwell Banker says is for sale at $2.1 million or for lease at 30 cents a square foot, to store some of its trucks, equipment and other material as a staging area for the massive project, according to economic development officials and a commercial broker knowledgeable about the racetrack property.
Meanwhile, Fortis and its small army of contractors have begun ripping up the grasslands to make way for Meta’s 945-acre first phase of construction.
High Plains Road that enters from the South Greeley Highway will initially bend south and connect with Parsley Drive off Terry Ranch Road, which connects with the I-25 exit to the east where fireworks stores are located near the Colorado border.
NDAs All Around
Everyone ranging from Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins and Laramie County Commissioner Gunnar Malm to Bailey Wheeler, a commercial broker with Coldwell Banker in Cheyenne, and Hale are keeping mum about the secretive project in south Cheyenne.
“I think it’s just one of those things that we can’t discuss until there’s public knowledge,” Wheeler told Cowboy State Daily.
LEADS owns and runs several business parks in the Cheyenne area, including the High Plains Business Park.
A press conference is planned for early July to announce the mystery and officially identify the enterprise data company, Collins told Cowboy State Daily.
Keeping secrets on business deals are not new for Cheyenne officials.
They’ve been to this rodeo before.
In recent years, Cheyenne area officials signed NDAs on projects involving Microsoft Corp. when it expanded to the Cheyenne Business Parkway area south of Interstate 80 near Campstool Road and the Burlington Trail; and with 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, located just south of I-80.
LEADS and government officials dubbed the Cheyenne Business Parkway expansion as “the Bronco Philly Project,” which was a reference to Microsoft’s plans to build data centers in this eastern outskirt of Cheyenne.
Before the wraps were taken off, Microsoft’s plans to build more data centers in the North Range Business Park were called “Project Equality.”
Microsoft also has data centers in three other LEADS-run business parks encircling Cheyenne.
“This has been great for a community that hasn’t been historically reliant on the minerals industry like other counties in Wyoming,” Malm told Cowboy State Daily. “We’ve carved out a niche community in the tech sector.”
Collins said that because the smaller 400-acre parcel adjacent to the North Range Business Park was annexed by the city, the next step is to annex the adjoining North Range Business Park. The move is seen as a benefit to business park tenants because of a huge discount they’ll receive on water and sewer rates, he said.
Going For The Gold
Annexation new industries into the city isn’t new for Cheyenne. Last year, the city brought the High Plains Business Park into its fold, a sure tax revenue benefit for the city as well.
But that could become the farthest edge of the city to the south.
“I don’t see the city really going beyond Chalk Bluff Road. I’d be surprised if we’d even go beyond south of Terry Branch Road,” said Collins, who cited the high expense of delivering sewer and water through the rolling hills and tough terrain beyond the High Plains area.
With the massive data centers now rooted in the region, Cheyenne sees a need for more power production to be dispatched over its electrical grid.
The energy-guzzling centers in the region are expected to triple the electricity consumption to more than 1,000 megawatts annually in the next five years, said Collins, citing utility forecasts.
“The fastest growth is happening in Cheyenne,” he said.
Customers For Wind, Solar
Another underlying trend factoring into luring data centers to the region are clean energy supplies for the data centers, considered a marketing selling point for the huge corporations that own them.
Canada’s Enbridge Inc. is in the beginning stages of getting permits to build a $1.2 billion solar project capable of generating up to 800 megawatts of electricity and considered the largest in Wyoming.
That project will blanket the hilly grasslands to the east of South Greeley Highway with 1.2 million solar panels. Enbridge has stated that it wants to sell some of the electricity to super-sized data centers in the area, but won’t name any until it has a contract in hand.
The deal to sell the power is likely with Black Hills Energy, the Wyoming provider of electricity and natural gas for South Dakota-based Black Hills Corp., which has a power substation in the area, and which in turn would sell the power to data centers located along the South Greeley Highway corridor.
Another power provider is located on the western side of South Greeley Highway near the intersection of Chalk Bluff Road, where a 150 MW solar farm was recently built.
In September, that operation was bought by Atlanta-based Southern Co. from QCells USA Corp. The acquisition is the 30th solar project for Southern, but its first in Wyoming.
The project is scheduled to begin supplying electricity to Black Hills soon.
Hale said that the region is exploding with growth and the power requirements are substantial. Taken together, seven data centers have located in LEADS-owned business parks and provided $20 million in sales taxes paid on power, and more than $2.4 billion in capital investment since they were opened several years ago.
“We’re seeing a lot of energy companies contacting us, ranging from micronuclear reactors to hydrogen and natural gas plants,” she said. “There’s lots of stuff going on. I’ve been around 40 years. None of these parks have been built overnight.”
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
For four straight nights, Game Warden Spencer Carstens and a fellow officer sat in an unmarked vehicle at a Cody city park, windows down, staring into the blackness from dusk until 3 a.m.
Nothing happened.
The poaching caper that would become known internally as the “Cody Park Case” had been building since late August 2024, when residents began finding mule deer carcasses in their front yards and floating in a pond at the Park County Complex. The deer body count reached nine.
According to Wyoming Game and Fish, all nine were killed “right in the middle of town where deer like to hang out” by the library, not far from Canal Park and Glendale Park
All shot with a compound bow, all left to rot.
By the time wardens launched their stakeout, and the only lead was grainy security camera footage of a silver car cruising the neighborhood.
The full story of how the case came together is now the subject of an episode of the Wyoming Wildlife Podcast, hosted by Robert Gagliardi, the assistant editor of Wyoming Wildlife magazine. The podcast is a newer offering from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, and this particular episode stood out for good reason.
“Our law enforcement stories, those are a fan favorite because they’re very exciting, they’re incredibly interesting, and they do a great job just highlighting just how much work goes into successfully investigating and closing a case like that,” Amanda Fry, public information officer for Wyoming Game and Fish, told Cowboy State Daily.
First Blood
In 2024, the first dead buck appeared in someone’s front yard near a city park, with a blood trail leading across the street and footprints disappearing into the grass. An arrow wound made the cause of death obvious.
“The first thing I kind of thought of was maybe it was a kid,” Carstens recalled for the podcast. A deer in a backyard, shot for fun — that was going to be the end of it.
But then, more reports came in the same day. A second buck, a couple of doors down, also arrowed.
Then a third, in a nearby park, where wardens recovered an arrow — an expandable broadhead fired from a compound bow, a typical hunting setup. Then deer four, five and six. Then number seven, found floating in a pond at the Park County Complex, requiring Carstens to wade out in chest waders to retrieve it.
All nine carcasses — two bucks, six does and a fawn — turned up within a tight radius around the county library and city park, right in the middle of town.
Every animal was shot and abandoned. None were harvested in any way.
“They were just killed and left,” Fry confirmed.
Silver Car
Being in city limits gave wardens tools they rarely get to use. Ring doorbell cameras from cooperative neighbors produced footage of activity on the nights deer were killed. Security cameras at a local business captured a silver car driving slowly up and down the street before parking, and a figure stepping out with a flashlight.
It was the first real break, but the footage was too grainy to identify a make and model, let alone a license plate.
“And of course, it’s one of those deals where there’s just silver cars everywhere you look, once you start looking for them,” Carstens said.
An early lead pointed to a group of teenagers spotted on Ring camera footage running around and riding in the back of a truck. Wardens tracked them down at a local school — only to learn they had been playing a supervised game that night, organized by Cody police. They were ruled out.
With no suspect and deer still turning up dead, Carstens and his team decided to stake out the park. They would sit in the dark and wait.
Fifth Night
By the fifth night of the stakeout, the wardens were running on fumes.
“We’re kind of tired, kind of getting sick of it, trying to figure out what are we going to do next because this isn’t working,” Carstens recalled.
Then they heard it — the unmistakable thwack of a compound bow firing in the darkness, followed by the sound of an arrow hitting flesh.
Using night vision, the wardens looked out into the park. A man was standing there holding a bow, standing over a dead deer.
Carstens crept out of the truck and got as close as he could before making contact. The man bolted.
“I actually get in a foot pursuit with this guy,” Carstens said. “He was a young, pretty fast guy, so he got away from me.”
But the suspect had to have driven there. Wardens fanned out and found the silver car parked about a block away. Peering through the window, they saw an arrow lying on the front seat that matched the one recovered from an earlier crime scene.
And the car was full of fresh groceries.
“Basically went out to get groceries, on his way home decided to pull over and shoot a deer in the park,” Carstens said.
Blood Science
The suspect — later identified as Joshua Tamirat Wielhouwer — fled the state. But wardens had his vehicle and, soon, search warrants for the house where he had been staying. Inside, archery equipment was scattered through multiple rooms. A second vehicle yielded more gear, including a bow and broadheads.
Some of that equipment had blood on it. In some cases, only minuscule traces.
Wardens had also been collecting the deer carcasses and storing them in an evidence freezer. They sent tissue samples from eight of the nine deer to the Wyoming Game & Fish forensics lab, along with every piece of blood-stained archery equipment from the house.
What came back was, in Carstens’ word, “remarkable.”
The lab matched all eight deer to specific pieces of equipment — individual broadheads, arrows and metal inserts — through DNA analysis. Trace amounts of tissue inside a tiny metal arrow insert were enough to tie a specific deer to a specific arrow.
“This is the first case that I’ve worked where we’ve actually been able to take nothing but DNA evidence and make a full case on it,” Carstens said. “Big kudos to the forensics lab. They really helped put this case together. We wouldn’t have a case without them.”
A cell phone search warrant then connected the suspect’s archery equipment to an older case — a beef cow shot with multiple arrows and left to die the year before, a case the Park County Sheriff’s Office had been unable to solve.
Serial Poacher
With a nationwide extraditable warrant issued through the Park County prosecuting office, officers in another state began looking for the suspect. He eventually turned himself in, flew back to Cody and sat in jail for 75 days before posting bail.
A trial was set for February 2025. Before it began, prosecutors and the defense reached a plea deal: guilty on nine of the 18 misdemeanor charges, $18,000 in restitution for the deer and one full year in county jail, with 73 days credited for time served.
The suspect also pleaded guilty to felony destruction of property for the cow, paying restitution to the rancher and accepting three years of supervised probation. All seized archery equipment was forfeited.
A year behind bars is an unusual outcome for a wildlife case in Wyoming, where penalties more commonly involve fines and revocation of hunting privileges, explained Carstens.
“This guy had never purchased a hunting license in Wyoming,” Carstens said. “He wasn’t really a traditional hunter in the sense that he buys a license, goes out in the field and looks to harvest anything.”
The warden’s best guess at a motive: the suspect was into archery as target shooting and “maybe just wanted to take it to the next level and see what he could do with his bow.”
Team Effort
Carstens credited his fellow wardens and the Game and Fish investigative unit — which considered the dead cow as a possible predator conflict before determining it had been killed by a bow — and the Park County prosecutor’s office.
“This was definitely the most collaborative effort that I’ve been a part of,” Carstens said.
The community played a role too. Neighbors willingly shared security camera footage, and residents who enjoy the town’s urban mule deer herd were eager to see the case resolved.
“Our hope is to cover everything Game and Fish is doing,” Fry said of the Wyoming Wildlife Podcast. “We have terrestrial habitat work, aquatic habitat work, but our law enforcement stories — those are a fan favorite.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
The Wyoming Department of Corrections Wyoming Honor Farm and the Bureau of Land Management have announced they will host an adoption on May 9 in Riverton.
According to a release, for more than 35 years, the Honor Farm has shared the BLM’s commitment to place animals removed from overpopulated herds into good, private homes.
The event will offer saddle-started horses, halter-started yearlings and gentled burros for adoption. Photos of many of the available animals can be seen by following BLM Wyoming on Facebook or X. The organizations are currently developing a Flickr album that will premier in the near future. The horses to be offered all originate from Wyoming public lands.
The Wyoming Honor Farm is located one mile north of Riverton. Take U.S. Highway 26 to Honor Farm Road.
On May 8, gates open at 12:30 p.m. Preview available horses and burros in-person starting at 1:30 p.m. All visitors must be offsite by 3:30 p.m.
On May 9, gates open at 8 a.m. and the competitive-bid adoption begins at 10 a.m.
Both days’ events are free and open to anyone interested in wild horses, the Honor Farm gentling process and the BLM wild horse and burro adoption program.
According to the BLM, it will provide applications and information about how to adopt on both days. The BLM reports the horses and burros are current on their vaccinations, de-worming and Coggins testing. Only covered straight deck or stock type trailers with swing gate and sturdy walls and floors are authorized for loading.
The Wyoming Department of Corrections reports that since 1988, the Honor Farm has helped the BLM place thousands of horses and burros. The WDC has a low recidivism rate, and leadership feels this is largely due to the meaningful work accomplished by the Honor Farm inmates, including the gentling of wild horses. Inmates who are released after working in this program have a greater chance of succeeding in the outside world, according to the WDC.
Refreshments will be available during the event. Ice cream sandwiches will be provided on Friday, May 8. On Saturday, May 9, breakfast and lunch will be available free of charge for attendees.
All members of the public entering the facility will be subject to security checks conducted by GSecurity, including vehicle inspections. For the safety of visitors, staff, and animals – pets, firearms, and alcohol are not allowed on site.
The BLM wishes the public to be aware that cell phones, smart watches, cameras, video equipment and tobacco products must be kept locked in your vehicle while onsite. To maintain a positive environment for visitors, a reasonable clothing standard must be adhered to. Shorts and form-fitting clothing are prohibited.
To learn more about the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, including adoption requirements, visit blm.gov/whb or contact the national information center at 866-468-7826 or wildhorse@blm.gov.
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