Lummis family could cash in on Microsoft data center expansion through Cheyenne land sales

Thousands of acres southeast of Cheyenne owned by and associated with U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis lie in the path of Microsoft’s planned data center expansion, Laramie County property records show.

One of Microsoft’s existing data centers — a climate-controlled warehouse of computers, data storage and networks — sits southeast of Cheyenne on land the company purchased from the Lummis family in 2021. In April, the Seattle-area tech giant announced plans to buy 200 acres adjacent to its data center in the Bison Business Park and said it will purchase another 3,000 acres nearby.

Lummis, members of her family and companies associated with them own about 6,000 contiguous acres that almost surround the Microsoft center. Microsoft displayed a map Thursday at a Cheyenne community information session showing its 3,200-acre expansion extending into that Lummis family property.

Microsoft’s pending purchases land at the doorstep of one of tech’s biggest supporters in Congress. Lummis, known as the crypto queen of the Senate, has sponsored at least five significant cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, blockchain, stablecoin and tech bills. Political action committees associated with her received $1.34 million, including from major cryptocurrency and tech interests, since Dec. 31, 2021 and July 2025, WyoFile and reporting partner the Sunlight Research Center have found.

Microsoft and members of Lummis family — the senator, her brother Doran and daughter Annaliese Wiederspahn — would not comment or agree to interviews about the development or their relationship to the project. The senator’s family has owned much of the expansion property for decades — some dating back to 1944 and before — and has a long history of ranching, real estate transactions and business operations in and around Cheyenne.

Wiederspahn is a board member of Cheyenne LEADS, a corporation dedicated to area economic development, including data centers.

Microsoft’s land-buy announcement comes as Cheyenne is quickly becoming a data-center hub — the city is weighing proposals for 40 to 70 new data centers, according to some estimates — amid questions among area residents about water and energy usage, plus sweeping changes to the landscape. Those concerns prompted the Cheyenne City Council to consider a moratorium on new data centers, but local officials ultimately voted against such a measure.

Lummis has heard those queries, she wrote in a September op-ed.

“During my travels across Wyoming, countless folks have approached me about AI and the data centers coming to our state,” she wrote. “I tell them the truth: If we don’t power America’s AI with Wyoming energy, China will build their AI dominance on their coal instead.”

Abundant energy and land

Data centers are large, climate-controlled warehouses that contain computers, data storage and networks — used by Microsoft to establish and maintain the Microsoft Cloud, where data is kept. “[Y]ou can store your photos, play Xbox games, video call with your family, and work on documents from anywhere and on any device, without needing a powerful computer,” the company explains.

While some data centers focus on storage, others focus on providing the computing power to operate artificial intelligence. Those servers can also be used for bitcoin mining. 

Wyoming’s coal and potential nuclear power generation are a plus for energy-hungry data centers and AI, Lummis has stated. Wyoming’s cool climate and lack of corporate business tax also fuel data center development near Cheyenne. The state’s open land is another plus for data center development — and Lummis and her family own a lot of it.

Microsoft established its existing data center southeast of Cheyenne on 249 acres of Lummis-family land in the Bison Business Park in 2021, a subdivision created through a fast-track planning process. Arp and Hammond Hardware Co., whose president is Lummis’ brother Doran Lummis, carved out an adjacent 200-acre parcel in April 2025, a year before the tech company announced its intent to expand there.

Beyond that, Lummis’ family owns almost all the surrounding land — about 6,000 acres of it — including property mapped for purchase by Microsoft and displayed at Thursday’s open house in Cheyenne. The sprawling holdings, most of which are unirrigated rangeland, are owned by Lummis family companies Arp and Hammond, Lummis Livestock Co., Old Horse Pasture Inc. and Sweetgrass Land Co., Laramie County property records show.

The expansion, Microsoft said in an April statement, will be “strengthening Southeast Wyoming’s role as a growing hub for technology-driven economic activity, innovation and job creation.”

Crypto Queen

Lummis, elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives in 1979 at 24, was the youngest woman to serve in the Legislature. Voters then elected her to the state Senate, Wyoming treasurer and, in 2008, as Wyoming’s lone U.S. representative. She won election to the Senate in 2020, defeating Democrat Merav Ben-David with 73% of the vote.

Lummis announced in December she won’t seek reelection this year.

While in the Senate, Lummis has advocated for and sponsored legislation boosting cryptocurrencies — virtual money like bitcoin and stablecoins — and supported technology innovators, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

In 2021, “I founded the Financial Innovation Caucus to educate my fellow senators about the vast potential of emerging technologies to promote financial inclusion and build new wealth for all,” she said in a statement that year.

In December 2022, she placed her shares of Microsoft (valued between $15,000-$50,000) and bitcoin (valued between $50,000-$100,000) in a blind trust “to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance of any such conflict.”

Details about the land sale, including the price, have not been publicly disclosed.