Google Puts $17 Billion Price Tag on Its First Wyoming Data Centre

The timing matters as much as the money. The announcement came two days after the US midterm elections, in which voters in many places rejected large AI data centre projects. Google is committing one of the year's biggest single-site infrastructure budgets in a state where it has worked out its power supply with local energy companies, and it is presenting the deal in terms meant to answer those voters' objections: who pays for electricity, how much water the site uses, and what the county gets back.

In a post on its corporate blog, Google said it "will pay for 100% of the power we use" at the site. The centrepiece of the energy plan is a 702MW fuel-cell development, contracted with American Electric Power, which runs on natural gas through Bloom Energy fuel cells and includes carbon capture and storage. Google called it the largest planned development of its kind. Tallgrass Energy and Black Hills Energy will run gas generators for the campus, and Google said it is paying for a front-end engineering study on fitting carbon capture to Tallgrass's combined-cycle turbines. The captured carbon would be stored at Tallgrass's Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. Google said this brings its total contracted carbon-capture capacity to nearly 1GW.

The data centre will be air-cooled to limit the strain on local water supplies, the company said, and Google is also funding water replenishment projects in the area. It expects to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes to Laramie County and School District 1, and it plans grants for K-12 education and workforce training, though it did not give a total for that spending. Google, Tallgrass, Black Hills, Related Digital, AEP and Bloom Energy are setting up a community council for the project.

The blog post did not give a construction schedule, a job count or the campus's total power capacity.

The Cheyenne Site

The project began under another name. Cowboy State Daily reported in July that Google was the owner behind Project Jade, a campus first developed by Crusoe on 716 acres of former grazing land in the Switchgrass Industrial Park, about eight miles south of Cheyenne. According to that report, Google revealed itself as owner in a site-plan amendment filed with Laramie County on June 30. The project was renamed Project Tembo, and construction passed to Jupiter Star Holdings, a wholly owned Google subsidiary. Crusoe had said it was asked to pause work at the customer's request.

County filings described in that report put the campus at 2.7GW, with room to grow to as much as 10GW. The plans include four data halls, an office hub and logistics buildings, with completion planned for 2031. Laramie County approved the original Project Jade permits in January.

What Google Is Offering

Google's pledges on power costs, cooling and local taxes follow the same pattern as recent commitments from its rivals. OpenAI has promised to cover the full power costs of its campuses, and Meta has described similar terms for the communities where it builds. Meta's president said this week that the election results would make new projects harder to win approval for.

Wyoming's gas, its geology for carbon storage and its open land give Google more control over its own power than most sites offer. Whether the campus reaches its 2031 completion date will depend on the fuel-cell plant and the Tallgrass generation being built on schedule.