When a company with Chinese origins broke ground last year on a crypto-mining operation in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a team at Microsoft that assesses national security threats sounded the alarm.
Not only was the site next door to a Microsoft data center that supported the Pentagon, but it was also about 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) away from an Air Force base that controlled nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The location could allow the Chinese to "pursue full-spectrum intelligence collection operations,” the Microsoft team wrote in an August 2022 report to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal body that monitors threats posed by overseas investors.