Tracey Hyatt Bosman has spent two decades helping companies decide where to put facilities like the one proposed in Bonner.

As managing director at BLS & Co., a boutique location advisory consultancy, Bosman works with data center operators and developers across roughly 20 states on siting and incentives.

Increasingly, she said, her job involves the harder problem of community acceptance.

"Ten years ago, you could walk into any community and say, 'I've got a data center project for you,' and they'd roll out the red carpet," Bosman told Cowboy State Daily.

Property tax revenue arrived without the school-system demands that come with housing developments, she said. Utilities welcomed the steady electrical load.

"Now, you're not really sure what you're going to get,” she added.

Wyoming was an early embrace, Bosman said.

Cheyenne in particular built a reputation on strong fiber connectivity along the national backbone and federal facilities that demonstrated the region's capabilities.

"Wyoming has generally been welcoming of data centers," she said. She has worked on Wyoming sites without yet placing a facility in the state.

Sites in Wyoming also tend to pencil out, she added.

"It's been a cost-effective place to have a data center," Bosman said, pointing to real estate and utility expenses.

Bosman warned against treating "data center" as a single industry category. The headlines focus on the largest hyperscale and AI campuses, she said, but the industry is broader than that.

"It always concerns me a little bit that data centers have become this monolithic tag," she said. "There are a lot of variations in the types of data centers that end up at sites."

The siting playbook itself has been rewritten by tight supply and heavy demand, explained Bosman. Where firms once started with a national map and whittled down to optimal locations, the process now often runs in reverse.

The new approach is identify a candidate site with seemingly favorable conditions, then push it through due diligence to see if it survives.

Community sentiment has moved to the front of that screening, alongside electric capacity, parcel size and floodplain checks.

BLS now monitors news coverage, council minutes, zoning actions and legislative activity from the earliest stages of a search.

Bosman uses the term "NIMBYism" to describe some local pushback, but said the bigger concern for her clients is what she half-jokingly called "moratoriumism" — the prospect of legal barriers at the state level.

New York has proposed a three-year moratorium on permits for data centers of 20 megawatts or larger. Proposals to slow or restrict data center development have also surfaced in Georgia, Virginia and Illinois, according to a recent blog post by Bosman.

“Moratoriumism” appears to have a foothold in Maine and Montana as well.

Beyond water and electricity, Bosman said the recurring local objections involve construction noise, generator testing, low-frequency vibration and the visual impact of large industrial buildings.

Some of those concerns are well founded, she said. Some reflect mistrust or misinformation.

Bosman emphasized how impacts vary case by case. Some communities have seen electricity rate increases tied to infrastructure upgrades. Others have actually seen rates fall when a steady data center load made the broader system run more efficiently.