WY / Cheyenne / first Mountain West moratorium / 70-project pipeline

Why it matters

Three updates. (1) Cheyenne is the first Mountain West city to introduce a moratorium, which extends the regulatory pattern past the existing Midwest, Sun Belt, and Northeast clusters. The site-readiness map should now treat the Mountain West (WY, CO Front Range, UT, NV, NM, MT, ID) as a third regional cluster with active local-moratorium risk, in addition to the established Midwest (MI, WI, OH, IN, IL) and Sun Belt (GA, NC, FL, AL) clusters. The Colorado SB 102 death (sine die May 13) is in tension with this — Colorado at the state level is non-regulating, but Denver passed a 1-year moratorium and Boulder has discussed one, so the Mountain West cluster is fragmented (state-level non-action + city-level reactive moratoria). (2) The 70-project pipeline disclosure is the largest single-jurisdiction number in any moratorium fight this year and reflects an underappreciated fact: Cheyenne has been quietly absorbing far more new project interest than the press has tracked. Reasons: cheap power from the state's coal-and-wind portfolio, fiber backbone access, low temperatures (free cooling 8-9 months/year), and a regulatory environment historically friendly to industrial development. The 70-project number is almost certainly inflated by counting early-stage inquiries as 'projects in discussion,' but even a 30-50% accuracy haircut gives 20-50 real projects in some stage of development, which would still be the largest single-metro pipeline outside Northern Virginia. For Cliff's regulatory tracking, Cheyenne / Laramie County should be added as a high-priority watch jurisdiction, and the journal/ should add a Cheyenne-area site-readiness page that catalogs (a) the existing Microsoft and Meta campuses, (b) the disclosed new-project pipeline, (c) the Laramie County zoning regime, and (d) the upcoming moratorium vote sequence. (3) The 'legally sound' objection is the most legally vulnerable moratorium ordinance in the current tape. Wyoming's zoning case law on takings is thinner than in NC, GA, or MI, and the state's political identity is structurally pro-industry development — a developer-filed takings challenge in Wyoming state court has a materially better chance of succeeding than the same challenge in Wake County, NC or Cass County, MI. If a hyperscaler with a Cheyenne project in early permitting decides to use the Cheyenne moratorium as a test case for striking down moratoria more broadly, this becomes the first appellate-level moratorium-legality fight in the country. Track the Cheyenne second-reading vote (late May / early June) and any developer-filed Article I Section 32 challenge as the next inflection points. Cross-reference to strategy/competitive-landscape-and-adjacencies.md — add a 'Mountain West' tier-row to the regional risk matrix, with Cheyenne as the first entry.