Microsoft building $112 million data center in Wyoming, as the state looks to boost such projects

It’s a good day in Wyoming, as the state has landed a more than $100 million project that will result in a new Microsoft data center in the area.

Wyoming, a state that is rather unpopulated and spacious, is on the prowl for such installations. According to DataCenterKnowledge, Wyoming hopes that Microsoft’s investment will lead to other such data projects finding their way to the state. That hope may not be too far-fetched, as the site notes that “[t]here is precedent for this, as Microsoft’s site location decisions were a factor in the formation of clusters in San Antonio and Quincy, Washington.”

Microsoft has been quite busy with its construction projects lately, recently turning on two new data centers for its Azure cloud computing projects. This is how the company announced that expansion:

To keep pace with growing demand, we are announcing two new datacenter options for Windows Azure. Effective immediately, compute and storage resources are now available in “West US” and “East US”, with SQL Azure coming online in the coming months.  These new options add to our worldwide presence and significantly expand our US footprint.

It has been said that Microsoft is looking for customers to fill its capacity, but perhaps the firm has in fact found demand in sufficient supply to warrant this continued roll out. I am assuming that this new data center is for Azure, or other cloud related products.

That is not certain, however. On the subject of not knowing exactly what this data center will finally be used for, NeoWin quipped that it could be slated to “support Farmville for WOA [Windows on ARM].”

For now, Microsoft is laying down serious new capacity, which is a bet on cloud computing growing. Needless to say, it’s the right wager.