Google Takes Over Crusoe's Wyoming Site for $17 Billion Campus

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.

The move signals how quickly hyperscalers are willing to absorb troubled projects rather than wait on independent developers, as AI training and inference loads keep pushing demand for new megawatts. Crusoe did not disclose the purchase price.

Why did Google step in?

TechCrunch reported that Crusoe, recently valued at about $30.9 billion, had tried to land Google as a customer for the Wyoming project. 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 framed the deal as the close of its pre-development work. That work included 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 "have set up the Wyoming project for construction and eventual operation."

What is Google building?

Google's Thursday post put the campus in Laramie County. It 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 made two concrete commitments on resources:

• It will pay for 100% of the power the site uses.
• The campus will be air-cooled to limit local water demand.

The company said it expects the Wyoming project to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes for Laramie County and School District 1. It is also standing up a Community Council with Tallgrass, Black Hills Energy, Related Digital, AEP, and Bloom Energy to work through growth issues around Cheyenne.

How will the campus be powered?

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.

The power stack does not stop there:

• Google plans to draw power from gas generators run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy.
• 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 demand grows—sometimes alongside off-grid generation experiments and large connectivity deals that move traffic between clouds and campuses.

What happens to Crusoe now?

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. That claim comes at a time when financing has already tested other AI infrastructure players on borrowing costs and delivery risk, making the sale a reminder that even well-funded developers face cost and schedule pressure.

The $17 billion Laramie County campus now moves forward under Google's direct management, with the 702 MW fuel-cell build and the Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub anchoring one of the most closely watched power-and-compute packages in the country.