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SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG IN CHEYENNE, WYOMING.
Five hours of testimony. Two amendments, dead on arrival. A group of local politicians, most of whom had already made up their minds long before anyone stepped to the microphone. They pulled out their “Why I’m voting for this Data Center” declarations, which were obviously written long before the city council meeting and public input was done, AFTER the long night of public testimony, which was overwhelmingly against the annexations of future data center land. Speeches that were typed up days before they walked in the door.
The only people I saw testify in favor of the data centers were people who received paychecks from Microsoft or some other organization or company that was receiving financial benefit from building the data centers.
Cheyenne City Council voted 6 to 3 a couple of nights ago (7-3 if you count the mayor) to hand Microsoft about 3,500 acres in a single motion, and by the time the gavel came down after midnight, the city had grown by 20 percent in one meeting.
Here’s the part nobody at that podium wanted to say out loud. The land Microsoft just bought belongs to the family of United States Senator Cynthia Lummis. The sale closed June 26. The vote to annex it happened 17 days later. And the woman whose family cashed the check is the same senator who has spent four years telling Wyoming that data centers are the answer to everything.
Let’s follow the money, because in Cheyenne, it all runs through the same six people.
THE LUMMIS FAMILY OWNS THE LAND UNDER THIS WHOLE STORY
Senator Lummis (crypto senator) and her family control roughly 6,000 contiguous acres that nearly surround Microsoft’s Cheyenne data center campus, according to reporting from WyoFile and the Sunlight Research Center. Microsoft’s first Cheyenne data center sits on 249 acres the company bought from the Lummis family back in 2021, land that was carved out through a fast-track planning process built for exactly this kind of deal.
A year before Microsoft ever made its expansion public, the senator’s brother, Doran Lummis, ran the company that split off an adjacent 200-acre parcel next door. That’s not hindsight. That’s timing. The family holds its land through entities with names like Sweetgrass Land Co. and Lummis Livestock Co., all sitting on Laramie County property records for anyone willing to look.
The senator placed her Microsoft stock and bitcoin in a blind trust back in 2022, saying she wanted to avoid even the appearance of conflict. She kept sponsoring crypto, AI, and data center bills anyway. Political action committees tied to her pulled in $1.34 million from tech and crypto interests between the end of 2021 and last summer, per the same WyoFile investigation.
And her daughter, Annaliese Wiederspahn, sits on the board of Cheyenne LEADS, the private economic development corporation that has been the loudest cheerleader for every data center deal to come through this county. When WyoFile called the senator, her brother, and her daughter for comment, all three said nothing.
THE ORGANIZATION EVERYONE KEEPS PRETENDING IS NEUTRAL
Cheyenne LEADS calls itself the economic development entity for the city and the county both. It holds the actual contracts to do that job. Its CEO, Betsey Hale, shows up at nearly every hearing to calm the public down, telling residents the rezoning isn’t really about data centers even while the developer standing next to her is confirming it is.
LEADS isn’t some outside watchdog keeping government honest. It’s a membership organization, funded by the same companies it recruits, and its board includes the senator’s own daughter. That’s not a coincidence sitting on the edge of the story. That is the story.
THE COUNCIL MEMBER WHO CALLS HIMSELF A PROUD MEMBER OF LEADS
Tom Segrave has sat on Cheyenne’s council on and off since 2000, and he says it himself, right on his own website: he’s a proud member of Cheyenne LEADS. He’s also chaired the Chamber of Commerce and run the Downtown Development Authority. On June 18, in his own published council column, Segrave thanked Tallgrass Energy for donating $2.9 million to the city for affordable housing, calling it great news, in the very same week the Public Services Committee spent four and a half hours pushing through Microsoft’s 3,000-acre annexation request.
Tallgrass is the company behind Project Jade, a 2.7 gigawatt data center and gas plant south of town. The council formally accepted that $2.9 million gift on June 22, the same meeting where it advanced the Highlands annexation on second reading. One local critic called it corporate camouflage, dressing up an industrial land grab as a gift to the working people it’s about to price out.
THE COMMITTEE CHAIR WHO CAME FROM THE SAME ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT WORLD
Kathy Emmons chairs the Public Services Committee, the exact body that has processed every single Microsoft annexation ordinance for the last two months. Before council, she ran the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services, working hand in hand with Cheyenne LEADS and the Wyoming Business Council. She isn’t a neutral vote weighing new evidence. She’s the chair of the committee built to recommend approval, staffed by someone who spent her career inside the same rooms as the people asking for the land.
THE MAYOR WHO DECIDED YEARS AGO
Mayor Patrick Collins has been publicly cheerleading data centers since September 2022, according to his own weekly column, where he wrote about courting T5 Data Centers and called Cheyenne the perfect site. In August 2025 he sat in a meeting with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, alongside Senator Lummis, specifically to talk about stripping regulatory barriers for data centers. In June 2026 he toured the Related Digital construction site and had lunch with 450 workers, thanking the company personally for its investment.
Collins compares data centers to Wyoming’s old coal mines and trona pits, the industries that built this state. He’s not hiding his position. He’s been saying it for four years. Last night wasn’t a debate for him. It was a formality.
THE OTHER PROJECTS RUNNING THROUGH THE SAME FRONT DOOR
This isn’t only a Microsoft story. Meta’s $800 million Project Cosmo is under construction in south Cheyenne. Related Digital broke ground on a $1.2 billion facility in October. Tallgrass is building Project Jade after Crusoe walked away from the partnership. Vantage Data Centers wants 1,800 acres along Terry Ranch Road. And out west of town, a Phoenix real estate firm called ViaWest tried to slip a Skybox Datacenters project through annexation on the Cox Ranch property before the council’s own committee caught it and voted it down, 2 to 1, after residents learned about the data center a week after the public hearing had already happened.
Every one of these projects runs through the same handful of people. The same LEADS staff show up to reassure the public. The same council members sit on the same committees. The same annexation playbook gets used every time: quiet land deals first, public hearings second, prepared remarks read from paper by people who never planned to be moved by anything said in that room.
Councilman Larry Wolfe tried to slow it down last night, twice, and lost both times. He wanted a real community benefits agreement, one requiring Microsoft to pay into this city the way real corporate neighbors do. That failed 7 to 3 a month ago. Last night’s attempt to simply delay the vote until January failed too.
Heather Madrid has been organizing the opposition petition since this fight started, standing up at every hearing to remind the council that annexation isn’t a right, it’s a process with rules, and at least two of those rules weren’t met here. Kathy White, a lifelong Wyoming resident, told the council straight to their faces that she came in believing they knew what they were doing and left disillusioned, watching them annex 3,460 acres with no written plan from the company benefiting most.
The people asking hard questions last night are neighbors. The people answering them are tied, by family, by board seats, by campaign columns, by four years of public record, to the very companies buying up Laramie County one annexation at a time.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s the paper trail.
