The Revenue Committee discussed a variety of Wyoming’s tax laws over two days this week, eventually bringing up a conversation around data centers. This comes as data centers continue to be a hot-button issue around the state, including in Cheyenne, Natrona County and Laramie.
When lawmakers met in Casper this week, they reviewed nine draft bills. Among those were data centers industrial property. This bill would change the tax classification of data centers from commercial to industrial. Currently, commercial properties are taxed at 9.5%, while industrial property is taxed at 11.5%.
According to a representative from the Wyoming Taxpayers Association, this would be a roughly 20% increase on data centers' final tax bill. A second speaker from the nonprofit Wyoming Economic Development Association suggested the tax hike would make Wyoming a less competitive state at a time when more and more data centers are planning buildouts.
The majority of the committee’s conversation centered around defining data centers, namely their size so as to not encompass smaller, lower-power data centers. Lawmakers voted not to forward the bill, with the intention of returning to it to more accurately define data centers and their appropriate property classification at the committee’s next meeting on Nov. 19.
The committee also reviewed a bill draft that would give the Wyoming Department of Revenue (DOR) the ability to compile reports on entities that get tax exemptions. Bret Fanning, the department’s director, said they receive a lot of reports from business entities, but not the ones needed to understand forgone tax revenue.
“When they report on their returns, there's really no purchase information,” said Fanning. “Just the amount of sales and the amount of sales tax you collected. What's different about this is, we’re trying to seek purchase information. We’re trying to figure out how much they didn’t pay tax on. That’s not on a return right now.”
According to Fanning, the DOR had “on and off” reporting requirements around exemptions that spanned back to the early 2000s. However, House Bill 197 from the 2024 legislative session removed the department’s reporting requirement. Fanning said the structure was something lawmakers wanted to review.
“There was a time where either me or my predecessor, in your November meeting of each year, would come to you and report on these exemption costs. And then I would have this big caveat saying, ‘Hey, these are all numbers we received, but we didn't have everyone report,’” Fanning told lawmakers. “And so the thought at the time was that that would be brought back better, for lack of a better term.”
While the bill would broadly affect any industry receiving tax exemptions, data centers led the conversation. Fanning told the committee he reached out to peers in Virginia for examples of reporting policy, in part because they’re the “data-center capital” of America. Fanning said that Virginia used a combination of Virginia's Department of Revenue, Virginia’s version of the Wyoming Business Council and the data center companies themselves to create a system of reporting compliance. Fanning called the policy “very good compliance."
DOR released a report in 2023 after two data centers in Cheyenne provided information about taxes they paid and were exempt from. The report found that the state missed out on about $22.6 million in sales and use tax.
Lawmakers asked the Legislative Service Office (LSO) to redraft a bill that previously tried amending this process, House Bill 155 from the 2026 budget session. That bill, sponsored by Rep. Gary Brown (R-Cheyenne), failed to be considered for introduction.
