Google is taking direct control of a southeast Wyoming data center site that Crusoe had been preparing, the AI infrastructure company said Friday. The handoff lands one day after Google described a long-term $17 billion plan for its first data center in the state.
Crusoe did not disclose the purchase price. In a statement, it said the deal closes out its pre-development work on the Wyoming project—site selection, governmental approvals, and a hybrid power strategy shaped with Tallgrass Energy. Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe’s co-founder and CEO, said Crusoe’s pre-construction efforts (origination, entitlement, and de-risking) “have set up the Wyoming project for construction and eventual operation.”
Google’s Thursday post put the campus in Laramie County and named Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power (AEP), and Related Digital as partners. Steve Walter, Google’s VP of global infrastructure and energy, framed the spend as a long-term bet on local jobs, power, and community programs. Google said it will pay for 100% of the power the site uses and that the campus will be air-cooled to limit local water demand.
Fuel cells, capture, and a bigger power stack
The power plan is unusually specific for a hyperscaler site announcement. Google said the project is contracted with AEP for a commercial-scale, 702 MW fuel-cell build with carbon capture and storage—described as the largest planned development of its kind so far. Bloom Energy will make the fuel cells in the United States, Google said and will convert natural gas into electricity through an electrochemical reaction.
Captured carbon is slated for permanent geologic storage at Tallgrass’s Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. Google said the work brings its contracted U.S. carbon-capture capacity to nearly 1 gigawatt. It also plans to draw power from gas generators run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy, and it is running a front-end engineering study on fitting Tallgrass combined-cycle turbines with capture gear.
Crusoe’s own account of the earlier joint work matches that mix: fuel cells, grid power, and natural gas turbines, with a longer roadmap for capture through Tallgrass’s regional hub. Independent developers have been racing to assemble similar packages as AI training and inference loads keep pushing for new megawatts—sometimes alongside off-grid generation experiments and large connectivity deals that move traffic between clouds and campuses.
What changes hands—and what doesn’t
TechCrunch reported that Crusoe, recently valued at about $30.9 billion, had tried to land Google as a customer for the Wyoming project and that Google is now taking over the development itself after questions about cost and schedule under Crusoe’s management. Neither company published a price for the site transfer. TechCrunch also noted Crusoe had planned to eventually scale the Tallgrass-backed campus to 10 gigawatts of power capacity.
Crusoe is not exiting Google’s broader buildout. The company said it remains the developer of Google’s data center campus under construction in Armstrong County outside Amarillo, Texas. Lochmiller put Crusoe’s contracted capacity above 6 GW, with more than 40 GW in its pipeline—at a time when financing has already tested other AI infrastructure players on borrowing costs and delivery risk.
Google said it expects the Wyoming project to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes for Laramie County and School District 1, and that it is standing up a Community Council with Tallgrass, Black Hills Energy, Related Digital, AEP, and Bloom Energy to work through growth issues around Cheyenne.
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