Google Is Spending $17 Billion on Its First Wyoming Data Center

Google will build its first data center in Wyoming. The company announced a long-term investment of $17 billion on Thursday, for a campus in Laramie County near Cheyenne.

The site is known locally as Project Tembo. It covers 716 acres in the Switchgrass Industrial Park, about eight miles south of Cheyenne.

On Friday, Google took over the site itself. Crusoe, the AI infrastructure firm that developed the project, said Google has acquired its data center site in southeast Wyoming. The terms were not disclosed. Crusoe said its work on the project is done: site selection, government approvals and the power plan. It is developing another Google data center campus in Armstrong.

Bloomberg reported that Google stepped in after Crusoe failed to lock in customers for the Wyoming project. The campus was first pitched by Crusoe and Tallgrass Energy.

How it will be powered

Google is building the campus with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power and Related Digital. The power plan centers on a 702-megawatt fuel cell development with carbon capture, contracted through AEP. Google calls it the largest planned development of its kind.

The fuel cells run on natural gas and will be made in the United States by Bloom Energy. American Electric Power said in October that it plans to invest about $4 billion in the plant and sell its power to Google under a 20-year agreement. Construction is set to start this year, and the plant is expected to be fully running by the end of 2028.

The carbon capture equipment would catch a large majority of the fuel cell plant’s emissions and store them underground at Tallgrass Energy’s Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. Google says the project brings its total contracted carbon capture capacity to nearly one gigawatt.

Google is also getting power from gas generators run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy. It is studying whether to fit Tallgrass’s combined cycle turbines with carbon capture as well.

Google says it will pay for 100 percent of the power the campus uses. It will also pay for the infrastructure its growth requires. The data center will be air-cooled, to limit the strain on local water supplies.

What Cheyenne gets out of it

Google expects the project to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes for Laramie County and School District 1. The company also projects more than 8,800 jobs statewide during construction, with about 2,500 workers on site at peak. Once the campus is running, Google expects it to support more than 3,700 jobs a year, including 250 roles created directly. Those are the company’s own projections.

Google held a community meeting in downtown Cheyenne and met with more than 200 residents in Laramie County. The company and its partners are setting up a Community Council to work through how data center growth affects the city.

The announcement comes at a tense moment for data center building. Voters rejected data center projects in 40 of 41 ballot measures across the country last week. OpenAI said on Friday that it will press ahead with its own data center expansion despite the Democratic sweep in the midterms and the prospect of tighter scrutiny.

Google gave no completion date and no computing capacity for the Wyoming campus itself.