The Cheyenne Crosswind

CHEYENNE, WY—Touting a breakthrough it called decades in the making, Microsoft announced Thursday that its proposed 3,200-acre campus southeast of town will be the world's first data center cooled entirely by wind.

"Most data centers spend millions on chillers, evaporative towers and liquid cooling loops," said Dana Perrault, Microsoft's newly appointed vice president of atmospheric infrastructure, gripping the podium with both hands as her notes departed eastbound. "Here, we just leave the west side open. Our thermal models show the servers will run cool, and occasionally they will run to Nebraska."

According to planning documents, the facility will forgo walls on its windward side, a change engineers adopted after the first three prototype walls were recovered near Pine Bluffs. In their place, the company will install what it calls a Passive Intake Array, which officials confirmed is "the absence of a wall." Each server rack will be secured with four 10,000-pound ratchet straps and a buried concrete deadman.

The company said the design achieves zero water consumption. "Any water we put on site would either evaporate or end up in Kansas," Perrault said. "So we stopped trying."

Engineers noted the system's only point of failure is a sustained wind speed below 25 mph, an event local records indicate typically occurs at least once each summer. In this event, a Tier IV redundant cooling system will activate, consisting of 40 contract employees with backpack leaf blowers.

"This is cloud computing in its purest form," Perrault said. "The cloud is moving at 60 miles an hour, and so is everything in it."

The project is expected to create 300 jobs, including rack wranglers, a director of tumbleweed mitigation and a fleet of retrieval associates who will patrol I-80 in pickup trucks. Applicants must pass a field test in which they hold a cup of coffee outdoors for 30 seconds without losing the lid.

Local reaction was muted. "Everybody in this town has been wind-cooled since birth, and nobody ever threw us a press conference," said Darla Kuchenbecker, 61, who has lost a trampoline, four patio umbrellas and the driver's-side door of a 2004 Buick LeSabre to the phenomenon Microsoft now calls "a durable competitive moat."

Rancher Wade Hollister was more generous. "They're the first outfit to come out here and call the wind a feature," he said. "Most folks just call it the reason they moved to Fort Collins."

Laramie County Commissioner Gary Tschetter praised the deal, saying the county had spent decades trying to attract an industry that could make use of its primary natural resource, "which is air going sideways."

At press time, Microsoft had suspended the announcement's livestream after the camera, its tripod and three members of the press corps were reported passing through Sidney, Neb.