CloudGoogle acquires Crusoe’s Wyoming data centre site for $17 billion campus
Google has acquired an unfinished site near Cheyenne from developer Crusoe as part of a $17 billion commitment to build its first data centre campus in Wyoming.
CloudIn brief: Google has acquired the unfinished Crusoe Wyoming data centre site in Laramie County. The takeover follows a $17 billion commitment by Google to build its first facility in the state.
Google has acquired the unfinished Crusoe Wyoming data centre project near Cheyenne. The takeover came a day after the company pledged $17 billion to build its first facility in the state.
From Project Jade to a Google takeover
Crusoe, an eight-year-old developer based in Denver, announced the southeastern Wyoming project in July 2025 alongside Blackstone-backed Tallgrass Energy. Known as Project Jade, the campus was planned as a 1.8-gigawatt (GW) site scaling to 10 GW. Crusoe paused work in June.
Local reports in July identified Google as the company behind the Laramie County site, with its subsidiary Jupiter Star Holdings, LLC replacing Crusoe. Earlier reports suggest the campus could reach 2.7 GW. The sale completes Crusoe's pre-development work on site selection, government approvals, entitlement, and power planning.
Fuel cells and carbon capture power the campus
Google partnered with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power (AEP), and Related Digital on the campus. Under a power purchase agreement signed with AEP in October, the site will use a 702-megawatt (MW) fuel cell project with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Bloom Energy will supply the natural gas solid oxide fuel cells for AEP.
Captured carbon dioxide will go to Tallgrass Energy's Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. The site will also use grid power and natural gas generators run by Tallgrass Energy and Black Hills Energy, with Google paying for 100 per cent of its electricity. “Together, these efforts represent a novel approach to powering data centers efficiently, accelerating the commercialization of CCS, and creating pathways to reduce the carbon emissions associated with natural gas generation,” said Steve Walter, vice-president of global infrastructure and energy at Google. An air-cooled system will “minimize strain on local water resources,” Walter said.
Crusoe expands in Texas despite development hurdles
The sale comes as independent developers face equipment and power bottlenecks alongside local opposition. Voters rejected data centres in 40 of 41 local ballot measures, Bloomberg reported, while several newly elected governors promised this week to curb new sites. Still, Crusoe is building another Google campus near Amarillo, Texas.
Chief executive officer Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness founded Crusoe to mine cryptocurrency with natural gas that would otherwise be burned off. Today, Crusoe leases space for customer graphics processing units (GPUs), rents its own GPUs, and sells artificial intelligence (AI) inference compute. In September, it raised $3.9 billion at a $30.9 billion valuation and added three board members, including Tesla board member and Redwood Materials founder JB Straubel.
“Crusoe is in the business of activating gigawatts for intelligence,” said Lochmiller. “With more than 6 GW contracted and over 40 GW in our pipeline, we are eager to steward the development and energization of the foundational infrastructure of AI.” Crusoe also signed Meta in June, secured a reported five-year, $13 billion cloud deal with Jane Street, and is building campuses in Abilene, Texas, for Oracle, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
What happens next
Google plans to finish four data halls, an office hub, and logistics and network buildings on 716 acres in the Switchgrass Industrial Park, eight miles south of Cheyenne, by 2031. The company is running a front-end engineering and design study on fitting Tallgrass Energy's combined cycle turbines with CCS, and expects the campus to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes.
The project joins several major builds in Wyoming's capital, where Meta operates a campus, Microsoft broke ground in August 2025 while seeking 3,200 more acres, and Related Digital started a $1.2 billion CoreWeave site in October 2025. In Texas, the first building at Crusoe's 900 MW Microsoft campus is due online in mid-2027.
Sources: TechCrunch, Crusoe, Data Center Dynamics, The Next Web
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