Wyoming’s Answer to Why Data Centers
As data centers have become a national political issue, they have been accused of many things, including “breaking American politics.” However, deliberation over proposals for data center construction plays out at the community level, often with significantly more nuance. Although city and state governments are under pressure to make the local benefits of development visible, they must search for strategies that squeeze value out of these negotiations for their communities.
On this episode, host Megan Nicholson is joined by Jacob Hochard, associate professor of conservation economics in the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming, and Caden Bogus, a graduate research assistant and interdisciplinary master’s student at the University of Wyoming, to discuss Wyoming’s position as an up-and-coming spot for data center development. Wyoming’s energy production, cool climate, affordable land, and friendly tax policies have positioned the state as an attractive spot for data centers. How this growth gets translated into gains for Wyomingites has the potential to shape the future of the industry in the state and beyond.
Resources
- Read “How Communities Are Bargaining With Big Tech Over Data Centers” by Jacob Hochard and Caden Bogus to learn more about how communities are negotiating with data centers.
- How are data centers impacting the midterm elections? Check out this article by Nicol Turner Lee and Darrell M. West.
Transcript
Megan Nicholson: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University. I’m Megan Nicholson, senior editor at Issues.
Data centers have quickly started to shape national politics, but the deliberation over their development is played out locally, community by community. How does a city council or a county development board prepare to sit across the table with Microsoft or Google and get a good deal? There isn’t a blueprint for getting real local value out of these negotiations.
I’m joined by Jake Hochard and Caden Bogus, who wrote about this for our Summer 2026 issue in a piece called “How Communities Are Bargaining with Big Tech Over Data Centers.” Jake is an associate professor of conservation economics at the University of Wyoming, and Caden is a graduate research assistant and interdisciplinary master’s student at the University of Wyoming and they’re here to discuss how Wyoming is dealing with data centers.
Jake, Caden, thank you so much for joining us today. Jake, you are a natural resource economist, and Caden, your master’s is focused on rare earth elements and industrial policy. I wanna start this conversation by talking about when you first started thinking about data centers. Jake, why don’t you take it away?
Jacob Hochard: Yeah, so I’m a natural resource economist by training, but most of my work is actually focused on wildlife management, water resource management, land use. I’ve been focusing on those applied topics for the past 10 or 12 years, and I returned to the University of Wyoming in 2020, and data centers started picking up steam shortly after that, and became one of the most interesting policy questions that we’re facing. And they also happen to fall into the category of kind of being at the confluence of water, wildlife, land use management, energy policy. So I had separate areas of experience and expertise working in that domain, and then it tied together nicely. So the first time we got serious about studying data centers and how they influence communities was probably late 2024.
Nicholson: And Caden, as a native Wyomingite, is that the right word?
Caden Bogus: Yep, exactly.
Nicholson: A native Wyomingite, when did you start thinking about data centers?
Bogus: In my junior and senior year of my undergrad here at University of Wyoming, I had two, I had concurrent degrees. I had one degree in our College of Business, and I had one degree in our Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. And for a long time, I thought that a lot of those degrees, the world development and the world of preservation and conservation were incompatible. But as I started learning more about the history of my state and development throughout the state of Wyoming is pretty good, in my opinion, at responsible resource development and making sure that communities capture the benefits from our extracted industries.
And so I could see that we’re moving towards this economy driven by AI that’s going to be run obviously by data centers, and then I started thinking, what is going to be the inputs that go into those data centers? There’s raw inputs that have to go into there. So particularly with my work in rare earth elements end up making high-strength permanent magnets with minerals such as neodymium that are used as the hard drives and the cooling in these data centers and other applications.
The state of Wyoming is pretty good, in my opinion, at responsible resource development and making sure that communities capture the benefits from our extracted industries.
Wyoming also is a historically energy-producing state, and we also have innovative energy sources now popping up in the state such as a nuclear plant in Kemmerer. So I could see that there’s kind of a really nice opportunity for Wyoming to capture the full circle of the value and supply chain here, and it matters to me because Wyoming is good at capturing the value from our natural resource industries the way we have our severance taxes set up through our permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund and so I could see an opportunity here that this could really benefit Wyoming communities in a beautiful way.
Nicholson: I want to come back to the community benefits in a bit, but first, where does Wyoming stand in terms of the number of existing or proposed data centers compared to other states?
Hochard: Compared to other states, I’m not sure the exact number. When we wrote the article, we had 21 operating in the Cheyenne area, and those are 21 facilities. I think it’s less operators that are actually controlling those facilities. But it’s growing rapidly, and the most relevant number is probably the size of the data centers and also the size of the coming data centers. So we’re seeing orders of magnitude and growth in total gigawatts serving these facilities, and we expect to continue seeing that over the next five or 10 years.
Nicholson: So compared to like other states that have been attracting smaller data centers over like the last decade, say, Wyoming has really made a name for itself as a hyperscaler home. Would you say that’s right?
Hochard: Not yet, but I think we have the potential to. So that conversation is at the early stages. One of the largest projects that the US has or, at least will have ever seen in the next couple of years is slated to be in a part of our state. That’s Project Tembo, which is a combined effort between Tallgrass and Google. So we’re seeing large infrastructure. We’re still a very small state, least populous state in the country, about a half million people. So there are massive data center build-outs in places like Texas, Ohio, Virginia, but Wyoming punches above its weight, I’d say.
Nicholson: What makes Wyoming an appealing place for data center development?
Bogus: For one, it’s a cool climate. A lot of the debate around data centers is concerns over water usage. There’s new technologies now being advanced in data center development, use air cooling instead of water, which of course, though, that has to be supplemented by a base load energy source, typically natural gas. So you need to have a cool climate because it’s much more efficient if you have a data center that’s air-cooled in a cool climate, which Wyoming is. When people come here for the first time, I say, “Welcome to the tundra that we call home,” because it truly is. We sit here in Laramie at above 7,000 feet of elevation. So for those cooling properties, it’s very attractive. There’s also, tax incentives the state has developed over the years to attract these data centers, and our utility providers in the state too have also positioned themselves uniquely to service these large power holders and power producers in data centers.
Hochard: Yeah, each place has its own challenges for data centers, and Wyoming is a high alpine desert, and, water is our challenge. Like Caden said, some of the new technologies, especially these closed loop systems that recirculate water, really aren’t as intensive in water consumption and use as I think a lot of people think. And if you compare them to heads of agriculture use or golf course use, that becomes a really kind of compelling case. But also just the energy heritage of the state. This is a state that’s used to creating energy, exporting sources of energy. We’re used to industrial siting. We’re used to having big buildings, big infrastructure in our backyards, and the supporting infrastructure like power lines, energy plants to power it. So all those things taken together, data centers are almost a familiar prospect for us. Now, they’re also different in quite a few ways, but I think there is a level of familiarity that Wyoming residents maybe can grab onto quicker than other places in the country.
Nicholson: Yeah. One of the things that you mention in the piece I think is really interesting is that there’s really more that goes into preventing electricity bills from going up than just saying no to a data center, and Wyoming has been a leader in developing negotiations between the utilities and the larger companies coming in. Can you talk a bit more about that?
Hochard: Yeah. When Microsoft started, I think its data center went live around 2014 in Cheyenne, it was the first large load to hit our grid, and that was fairly unprecedented. Now it’s becoming very common for data centers to arrive in a small town or a utility and say, “Hey, we would like 100 megawatts or a gigawatt of power,” something that’s completely unheard of for that area. So we were a little early to the game in attracting Microsoft, and Microsoft is by all measures been an excellent partner in the state of Wyoming and in the city of Cheyenne. And when we negotiated the tariff in 2014, the fundamental principle that guided that negotiation was new data centers have to bring their own power. Consumers are not gonna experience increased rates. We can’t let local citizens underwrite the power infrastructure that’s gonna power these massive data centers. That’s not a popular prospect. Now fast-forward 10, 12 years, that’s a household conversation. That’s something that you can’t turn the news on and not hear being discussed, not hear federal proposals, state proposals. But we were a little bit ahead of the curve in that way, and I think it’s positioned us to maybe move quicker and understand that ratepayers can be protected with novel contracts.
Nicholson: And what about how the development of data centers is linked to the development of advanced nuclear in Wyoming?
Bogus: Yeah. So nuclear is really interesting because… it’s considered a green energy, right? Because it isn’t associated with the traditional greenhouse gases we have with our other base load power sources. And what I mean by base load power source is a power source that you can have on 24/7, right? And that’s historically been coal and natural gas, which Wyoming is already really good at. As we move towards people calling for more climate action, these things, and reduced emissions, nuclear’s a really interesting source that can serve as a base load power source and also reduce emissions. And it’s really interesting across the country and in Wyoming, an insight that both Jake and I have noted is that these data center build-outs could actually serve as a really nice capital trigger for us to modernize our grids and move towards more clean energy sources.
Nicholson: Tell me more about this capital trigger idea.
Hochard: If you zoom out, I think we’re potentially in the middle of the greatest capital mobilization that the US or the world has ever seen, just in the sheer amount of investment in infrastructure, investment in data centers, the accompanying power sources, and if not over the past three years, certainly looking forward over the next eight to 10 years, what the projections are. So that does create opportunities. One, it creates opportunities for these data centers and the AI economy to potentially flourish, but also to modernize public infrastructure, whether it’s grids, redundant power sources, a transition towards cleaner energy sources. These are things that we’ve struggled with as a country. It’s been difficult to build new things.
And some of the principles and concerns that have, I’d say, stifled energy growth and modernization has been things like NIMBYism. “We don’t want these things in our backyard.” So it’s not without the same challenge. Data centers are not popular. They have a popularity issue. They need a, a different PR manager. But there is an imperative now, and financing behind some of these projects that could really help with some of those bottlenecks and challenges of the past.
Bogus: Yeah. And I would add two more insights to that. The demand of power these facilities are requiring… there will be supplements to each other, right? I don’t– I think we’re past the point maybe of complete replacement of some of our historic energy sources, and luckily Wyoming is known as what we have a clean coal. Burns a lot cleaner than a lot of the coal in other parts of the country. I don’t think it’s gonna serve as a capital trigger to entirely replace a lot of existing power sources we already have. And the other thing is, the grid modernization efforts also play a key national security issue because it can work towards decentralizing our power grids, which has a certain element of safety.
Nicholson: We’ve talked about minimizing the impacts of water usage and energy prices to consumers, but what other benefits of data centers show up in communities in Wyoming? Can you talk more about the ways that the citizens of Wyoming are seeing or might see benefits?
Data centers have tremendous benefits, but they’re not advertised super well. They’re a little obscured, they’re a little ambiguous, they’re intangible.
Hochard: I think the key phrase there is show up, and something Caden and I have really focused on the past year and a half through his thesis work is the tangibility of the benefits. Even if the benefits are there, they might not be as visible as the historical prospects that, you know, residents of Wyoming or any other state might have faced when they were looking at industrial projects.
If you take, for example, a Amazon distribution center or a Toyota manufacturing plant, those on the outside don’t look much different than a data center. There’s something that people understand, and the benefits of them are highly tangible because you see the workers from those particular facilities coming back to their homes. They’re sending their children to schools. They’re going to community organizations. They see each other at restaurants. So there’s a tangibility that makes those particular investments feel palatable and build support.
Data centers have tremendous benefits, but they’re not advertised super well. They’re a little obscured, they’re a little ambiguous, they’re intangible. So we do see tax revenue that’s funding emergency medical services, it’s updating schools. We see community benefits agreements being minted across the country. When those things can be advertised well and the local community understands in tangible ways what they’re getting out of the deal, we see support for those data centers rise, and we see the relationship between that data center and that community be really symbiotic. If those things are obscured or if it’s kind of a blanket promise of tax revenue and jobs, I think that’s when people become dubious.
Nicholson: Yeah. While I was editing your piece, I spent a lot of time going through public meeting records of different state’s data center advisory committees and county development commissions and press releases from cities, which gave me a taste of the research behind your review of different municipalities and community situations. I think it’s fascinating that a lot of this development, which is getting so much attention, you know, nationally, is really playing out in these hyper-local context, which isn’t like the usual face of tech policy. I’d love to hear what you both have learned about the ways that these boards and energy committees and other things are functioning on the front lines of data center development.
Bogus: Yeah. One of the major points we make in the article is that for these negotiations to be durable and for them to be visible to community, they need to be tailored locally to the needs and situational geography, energy situation, resource situation of that place, right? You really see that in places like Pima County, Arizona, for example. They have Project Blue and of course, it’s an area, you know, desert, dry water, and they’ve moved towards these more green energy solutions. They’re really taking advantage of bundling and these other mechanisms that are very locally tailored to the place that they are sited at.
Hochard: Yeah, the, the Tucson example is an excellent one, Caden. And in Wyoming, it’s clear for us that these conversations don’t just happen. They do take a lot of work. The responsible developers, the responsible hyperscalers have a very strong ground game, so they’re coming into communities well before they ever break ground, discussing what the needs are. And in the state of Wyoming, one role that the university can play is a convener or a facilitator of those conversations.
So Caden and I helped organize what was called Data Power 2026 back in April, where we brought some of the largest hyperscalers in the world, data center developers, leading energy providers, community organizations, students, academic scholars, into a room in a very intimate setting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and had those conversations. Because they’re, you know… There is industrial siting processes that are very clear. There’s city councils, there’s county commissioners. Most of those conversations, just by the very nature of how those groups are structured, are gonna happen behind closed doors. And certainly the data center developers and hyperscalers will do their best to have public comment periods and build goodwill, but that’s a role that I think universities can really support in bringing these people in the same room and saying, “Hey, we’re open for business, but this is what we need out of the deal, and we hope that it’ll work for both of us.”
Nicholson: We’re talking a bit about the balance sheets that are coming together around data centers. And you have… On one side of the balance sheet, you have states trying to demonstrate to companies that they have capacities to be optimal hosts for development, and then on the other side, you have companies putting potential benefits on the tables for communities to consider. I think it would be helpful for you both to weigh out what those balance sheets look like in Wyoming right now, and then maybe a couple of other states, examples of what’s on the table, what’s being considered.
Hochard: Yeah. Community benefits agreements on the community side are huge, and it’s essentially an agreement that says, “If you come to this community, yes, you’re gonna pay property taxes. Yes, you’re gonna pay taxes on electricity.” But above and beyond that, we want to have a minimum of X million dollars of investment. We want to have a fund that maybe receives a million dollars a year or two million dollars a year that can be used for these purposes. And what that does is it allows local decisionmakers, city councils, selected officials, to advertise real, tangible things that people understand.
People understand paved roads. They understand a new ballpark or an extension to a school. Hearing tax revenue as just some big blanket number, that doesn’t really come across with the same persuasion as some of these more specific deals. I also think for a place like Wyoming, as we see the popularity of data centers or unpopularity, let’s say, increase consistently from before we wrote this article to when it was published and continuing onward, these are not super exciting prospects for communities. And to me, that means that the bargaining position of the community is improving; you are in a better position to make larger asks or ensure that the asks that are going to make this a worthwhile pursuit for your community can be met.
And I think we’re seeing that, and one of the purposes of this article was to say, “Hey, here’s a blueprint of specific projects from across the country. Here are things that were asked for.” Whether it’s emergency medical services, hospital staff, especially during that build-out phase when you do have this massive influx of workers, skilled trade workers or decommissioning plans, electronic waste decommissioning, what happens when the facility shuts down. Those are all nuanced details that people really do understand and I think we’re seeing more and more clarity as these communities gain some experience in that negotiation.
The bargaining position of the community is improving; you are in a better position to make larger asks or ensure that the asks that are going to make this a worthwhile pursuit for your community can be met.
Bogus: Yeah. I would reiterate that data centers aren’t going to bring the traditional long-term jobs like these other industrial build-outs we’ve had in the past in the country. Something we talked about in the piece is how many of these proposals and community wishlists can really reduce polarization in the community. That’s something that’s really fascinating to me because as data centers, you know, one poll we cited in the article is that seven in 10 Americans now oppose data center build-outs.
All of a sudden, though, with pressures being put on these communities to make decisions quickly as these, these data center build-outs are going up all over the place, communities are banding together and people from complete different opposite sides of the spectrum are able to agree on how this can fund our schools? How is it gonna make better or make worse our emergency services? These things are really concrete and tangible that people see in their everyday lives that I think could serve as an opportunity to really reduce some polarization broadly in our country too.
Nicholson: Yeah, one thing you talk about in the article is the concept of wishlists, of communities coming together to build these wishlists. Can you talk a bit more about that?
Hochard: Yeah. So the wishlists are tangible things that a community can receive from welcoming a data center in, go beyond, some number on the end of the year tax statement. One of the benefits, you know, hindsight of having these developers come to the University of Wyoming and visit us in Jackson Hole and have these conversations, is you get to hear how they approach that balance sheet as well. What are their needs, what are their asks, and what are they offering? And the word wishlist is a quote from one of those major data center developers that said, “When we arrive, let us know what you need. Get your wishlist together.” And in our conversations with these various representatives, they seem incredibly genuine, and coming away from those conversations, it’s very clear that they don’t want a community to just roll over when they arrive.
I think one thing we’ve seen around the country is maybe a level of star-struckness, if you will, that one of the top seven biggest companies in the country is knocking on my door and talking about a $50 billion or $100 billion investment. That can be really exciting. But they would rather have a deep negotiation, very clear expectations and terms for that agreement. What do you need for us to win your support? And what do you need for us to be a durable partner for you over the next 20, 30, or 40 years? Because outside of formal channels, like industrial siting, city council support, county commissioners being on board, at the end of the day, every community in the US has a social license to welcome or not welcome a place.
And the biggest liability that a major data center, hyperscaler that’s underwriting the data center, can face is protests in the street or bad press. So they really genuinely need that bargain to be durable, they want the agreement to be mutual, and they want those terms to be clear. So we use the phrase wish list because we think it’s a useful one, but really it’s ensuring that the bargain is durable, and that both sides are getting something out of it.
Nicholson: Yeah, that demonstration of durability is a really interesting concept when you’re expanding that representation into all of these other areas. I guess not just resting on jobs. What kinds of jobs and skills do data centers need? What are the workforce implications?
Hochard: Data centers get a lot of heat, because… that’s not a pun. Because the job prospects, at least the majority of them, are short-term and temporary. You’re having welders come in, electricians, plumbers, excavators, concrete people. These folks are all coming in, doing their jobs, and then leaving. But it is a multi-year tens of multi-billion dollar investment, and those jobs are not negligible. And any major construction project in the US is going to have a huge short-term influx of skilled laborers and then eventually settle down to a more steady state of generally higher paying jobs. So I think that maybe the reputation of short-term job bump, but, you know, fleeting, I think it deserves a little more credit for the local stimulus that can happen from that one-time influx. And the jobs that do remain, they are very high-paying jobs. There have been stories of, communities asking for internships for their local students to be able to go work at a Google data center, a Microsoft data center, so there’s some serious return to the community in that regard as well.
Bogus: Yeah, there’s another piece there particular to Wyoming, and many of the discussions have included this, these DataX power events with leaders around the state, is that because we’re a state that’s had industrial development previously with our historic resource industries, we already have many of the trade schools in place that are designed to train students right out of high school so that they can work on these build-outs. And so there’s immediate jobs provided that we have, and we’re able to provide, we have a workforce that’s ready to engage in these build-outs in the state.
Nicholson: I want to come back to the element of transparency we talked about a bit, and just thinking about how the environmental impacts of data centers, like water usage and even air pollution from greater energy consumption, how do those show up in negotiations and agreements when it can be harder for communities to know about those impacts or to understand the downstream effects of what might happen?
Hochard: Yeah, it’s a serious challenge for a number of reasons. The first is potential trade secrets, that data centers are very secretive about their efficiencies. So if they do publish water use, even if it is a great deal for the local community, or they do publish their electricity use, it does reveal some maybe secrets or information about the level at which they’re operating that competitors could take that information and use to their advantage. There have been agreements nationwide where some of that stuff is required to be published, where complaint processing, there’s a very clear established protocol for issuing complaints, but those things do need to be negotiated up front.
And another point that we’ve been thinking about over the past year that I don’t think we developed in the article, but is relevant, is there’s just a lot of background noise over trends, you know, inflationary trends. So if electricity prices nationwide are increasing over time or water prices are increasing over time, it’s very easy to attribute a locally observed increase in water or electricity prices to a local development project. I know in The Dalles, Oregon, there was a project where I believe rates were expected to increase by thirty-five percent, but the data center presence helped temper that increase down to seven percent.
I know in the state of Wyoming, Cheyenne’s electricity rates have been increasing at a much lower rate than other places in the state. But causality and the kind of counterfactual trends of the world is something that’s very difficult for somebody to understand and observe. That causal inference challenge, the attributability, is also something that adds to the challenge of building support from data centers.
Bogus: Yeah, it hits on a line that Jake, entirely credit to him theorizing the article, it’s my favorite line from it, is that it’s important for people to know whether a data center is reducing a burden it created, reducing a burden that already exists, or both.
Nicholson: It seems like for a while states had been quietly putting incentives into place for the development of data centers, maybe for, more than a decade. But now that public opinion is on the decline in some states, and some states are walking back those policies, some states are putting in altogether new policies. So as we… I’m sure you get this question a lot, but as we head into the midterms, how are the politics of data centers shaping up in general in Wyoming, but how are they also shaping industrial development overall?
Hochard: It’s certainly front and center in the national conversation, certainly in our state conversation. One local newspaper in Wyoming picked up our article, Wyofile, and did a piece looking at what primary election results looked like as it related to candidate support or, lack of support for data center projects. It looked like from that reporter’s exploratory analysis that the candidates that were pro-data center generally got reelected across the state. Again, no causality there, just a, a trend. We haven’t studied that question formally, so it’s hard to predict. but it’s very difficult to suggest that data centers and the broader storm of the AI revolution, if you will have an impact on elections.
I also think that’s… You know, when we talk about popularity or support of data centers, that’s a really important confounder, is that data centers are physical infrastructure in local communities. AI and the trend of AI applications, cloud computing, LLMs, potentially military applications, geopolitical considerations, these are all things that are supported by data centers, but have their own popularity polling. So when we see lack of support for data centers, it may be the case that people are concerned with noise, they’re concerned with water consumption, they’re concerned with electricity drawdowns. It might also be the case that I don’t necessarily mind the data center and the tax revenue that comes from it, but I really don’t like that particular tech CEO. Like, that guy just rubs me the wrong way, or I really don’t like the prospect of AI technologies taking my job in five years. So when you look at the 80% number, an empirical question that we haven’t studied and that I haven’t seen researched is, to what extent is that 80% unpopularity driven by the local data center itself or the broader trends, in the technology that data centers support?
Nicholson: That’s really interesting.
Bogus: Like Jake said, we haven’t done formal studies on this, but as far as conversations I’ve had around the state with people, people do understand what’s at stake and understand that there are opportunities here for the state that could have positive cascading effects to our historic and energy industries. People who work in careers such as civil engineering are seeing huge revenues from the build out to these data centers. And so it is bringing tangible, visible fiscal benefits already to the state. But it’s something our article really reiterates is that we’re not calling for entirely being pro or anti-data center.
It’s all about how these deals are negotiated. And something I would say historically Wyoming’s been good at is having these high-risk extractive industries in a state that are not only for the sake of you’re never gonna have that resource again, but just that they they could provide a situation where a company could take advantage of a state, but Wyoming has always been very good at applying what we’re calling for in this article. You need visibility, enforceability, durability and transparency in these deals so that they actually, the communities see the benefits. If they’re gonna take on the risk of these data centers, they better see some of the reward.
Nicholson: As we close, I wanna come to a sort of big question that gets to those points, Caden. What do you think the story of data center development in Wyoming says about industrial policy at the state level?
You need to have a strategy that’s tailored to those local conditions and the local needs of the communities, as well as the local needs of the developers.
Bogus: Wyoming has always been a state that’s historically good at turning our natural resource endowments into visible wealth and benefits for our communities and the people that live here. Because of our traditional and historic extractive industries, we don’t pay a state income tax. We’re able to attend really nice public high schools and elementary schools throughout the state. We’re able to have our healthcare funded. And I believe we have… we still have challenges in the state, for example, rural healthcare, for example, something that, you know, or just other specific examples you could point to of places the state can still improve, that where these build-outs, if the deals are structured the right way, they could really fund those issues and help us to continue to make Wyoming, in my opinion, the greatest state to live, work, play, and raise a family.
Hochard: Yeah. Oh, that’s a great response, and I would add… I think Wyoming, we call it a pressure test in the article, I believe is the language we use. It’s an interesting place to evaluate data centers and the prospect of value coming from data centers back to their local communities because we’re very small, we have a lot of land. Our particular bargain is different than other places. Noise pollution, probably not an issue here. If you’ve been to Wyoming, you know you could have a data center in a place where you’ll never see it. We just don’t have the roads. Energy, we’re a very pro-energy development state. Industrial siting, we have that history.
There are other places, or one of our challenges is water, to the extent that’s a, a valid concern. There are other places in the country where that particular bargain is a lot different. So if you’re in the Midwest or the Great Lakes region, water’s probably not your biggest concern, but maybe population density is, maybe access to energy is. So, if there’s one take-home point from the Wyoming experiment, if you will, it’s that, an 80% popularity rating or 70% lack of popularity rating for data centers probably hides a lot of the interesting pieces of the story.
And it’s not necessarily that the data centers are not popular, it’s that the data centers create unique concerns in unique places. And to build support for them, you need to have a strategy that’s tailored to those local conditions and the local needs of the communities, as well as the local needs of the developers. They need to have reliable energy. They need to have a workforce that can build these things and then maintain them. They also need to have some latitude on water access. They need to have proximity to population centers where they can get low-latency bandwidth out to support major city centers. So these are all value prospects on the consumer side, the producer side, the, the community side, the developer side. And if there’s scope for agreement, that’s gonna come through earnest conversations and convening. And that’s something that we try to do in Wyoming and support.
Nicholson: Do you see the state and all of these cross-sector partners that you’re working with learning from the community benefits aspects of the data center exercise? Do you think that will translate into the development of other industries in the state?
Hochard: I do. And I think, we’re… Even beyond our state, Caden and I are actively facilitating that process. So when the issues piece was published, we used AI. We identified every data center development proposal for every small-town community in the US, made a list of about 50 of them, and emailed the article to the local counties, the local city councils, the local development commissions, the local economic growth and local economic development groups, and said, “Hey, here’s a playbook. Here are some examples where you might get some ideas of things you can ask for that maybe you hadn’t thought of because this is your first time doing this. But in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or in Tucson, Arizona, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, some of these questions have been asked already, and here are deals that might not make sense precisely for your case but might give you some, some ideas of what you can ask for.” So I do think we’re still on the learning part of this curve from the community side, and we’re hoping that this piece is one way to help expedite that learning and make sure that the lessons that have been experienced around the country also spill over to other communities that are welcoming or not welcoming data centers.
In Wyoming, you go out to the grocery store, you see the governor. You can’t, quote-unquote, “sell your state out” and then go show your face.
Bogus: Yeah, and as Jake has said throughout, Wyoming is serving as a true pressure test, and I think I would theorize part of that is because municipalities are smaller, right? Around the country in these larger states, municipalities you actually have direct access maybe to your mayors, the city council. Wyoming broadly as a state, we’re only half a million people, is highly accessible. You have more access. You probably have the same amount of access to our governor and our secretary of state as a lot of places like a, a county in Florida has to their city council. And so that’s also why Wyoming historically, I believe, has always rectified and dealt with these extractive and high-risk industries and industrial development in a really responsible way. ’cause you, in Wyoming, you go out to the grocery store, you see the governor. You can’t, quote-unquote, “sell your state out” and then go show your face. There is an element of trust and, your word is good, and a handshake is good still in the state of Wyoming, because I believe that accessibility piece due to our low population.
So yeah, part of those agreements, something we might not explicitly say, but, you know, there’s gotta be legibility on both sides so the developers have public certainty and regulatory certainty. But also on the community side, we gotta make sure that the agreements include that it’s not gonna sell out and compromise what makes these places around the country what they are and beautiful places to live, work, play, and raise a family.
Hochard: Yeah, that’s a great perspective that Caden brings as well as a multi-generational Wyomingite, if you will. I’m not from Wyoming. I grew up in Massachusetts and I’ve been in Wyoming now for a total of 12 years, but access to the governor is something you wouldn’t even dream about in a larger state or access to a US senator. Without exaggeration, these are people that we can get meetings with within 10 days. It’s unheard of. So that level of access is something that makes Wyoming very special.
Nicholson: I really appreciate you both taking the time to talk, and I really appreciate the level of nuance that you’re able to bring to this conversation about data centers.
Hochard: Thank you, Megan.
Nicholson: Read Jake Hochard and Caden Bogus’s piece called “How Communities Are Bargaining with Big Tech Over Data Centers” to learn more. Find links to this and more in our show notes. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach, and our podcast technical director, Roddy Nikpour. I’m Megan Nicholson, senior editor at Issues.
Thanks for listening.