Google commits $17bn to Wyoming data center campus powered by fuel cells

Google has formally confirmed a $17 billion data center investment in Wyoming, anchored by its first facility in the state on a 716-acre site eight miles south of Cheyenne, with earlier reports pointing to a capacity of up to 2.7GW.

The company did not disclose the campus capacity in its announcement. The project, revealed in July as Google's, will carry four data halls plus an office hub, logistics and network buildings, according to the application. Construction is slated for completion by 2031.

The campus sits in the Switchgrass Industrial Park in Laramie County. It is being developed through Google subsidiary Jupiter Star Holdings, which replaced Crusoe as developer. Crusoe had been building the site as Project Jade — a 1.8GW campus with potential to scale to 10GW — before pausing work in June, in Crusoe's words, "at the request of our customer."

How will the campus be powered?

The answer is a hybrid of fuel cells, gas generation and carbon capture, arranged through partnerships with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power and Related Digital.

Under a Power Purchase Agreement signed with AEP last month, the data center will draw on a 702MW fuel cell project equipped with carbon capture and storage. The solid oxide fuel cells come from Bloom Energy, run on natural gas, and will be owned and operated by AEP. Captured CO2 will be sequestered at Tallgrass's Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub nearby.

The site will also offtake power from gas generators run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy. Google is conducting a front-end engineering and design study on fitting Tallgrass's combined cycle turbines with CCS. The company has committed to paying for 100 percent of the power the data center consumes.

Steve Walter, Google's VP of Global Infrastructure and Energy, framed the arrangement as more than an energy contract. "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," he said.

Walter added that the data center will use an air-cooled system to "minimize strain on local water resources" — a pointed choice for a semi-arid region where water access has become a flashpoint for hyperscale builds.

What does this change for Cheyenne and Laramie County?

Google expects the project to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes for Laramie County and School District 1, according to the company. It recently hosted a community meeting in downtown Cheyenne to present the plans.

The commitment also deepens Cheyenne's position as a data center cluster. Microsoft broke ground on a Cheyenne campus in August 2025 and is seeking a further 3,200 acres of land. Meta already operates a large-scale campus in the area. In October 2025, Related Digital began construction on a $1.2 billion data center project for CoreWeave — one of Google's named partners on its own site.

For the broader market, the deal signals how hyperscalers now structure power-first data center builds in grid-constrained regions: on-site gas-fired generation, fuel cells and CCS stitched together through PPAs, rather than waiting on interconnection queues. Bloom Energy gains a marquee 702MW order, and AEP takes ownership of generation assets serving a single anchor tenant.

Whether the FEED study converts Tallgrass's combined cycle turbines into a CCS-equipped second power source remains the open technical question. With construction running to 2031, Google has time to answer it, and Wyoming has time to bank the tax revenue.