Crusoe confirms sale of Wyoming data center site to Google, capping a yearlong unraveling

Crusoe Energy Systems confirmed on Friday that it has sold an unfinished data center site in southeastern Wyoming to Google, closing out more than a year of uncertainty over who would ultimately build one of the largest planned computing campuses in the United States.

The Denver-based company said in a newsroom post that the sale completes the pre-development work it had done on the project — including site selection, government approvals and power-supply planning — since it launched the campus with the energy company Tallgrass in 2025. Crusoe did not disclose a purchase price, and Google has not said what it paid. The transaction was first reported by TechCrunch.

The sale came one day after Google announced, in a blog post from Steve Walter, its vice president of global infrastructure and energy, that it would make a "long-term, $17 billion investment" to build its first data center in Wyoming, in Laramie County near Cheyenne. Google said it would pay for 100 percent of the power the facility uses and that the campus would be air-cooled "to minimize strain on local water resources."

A Project That Changed Hands Twice

The Cheyenne campus has had an unusually public identity crisis for a facility that has yet to break ground. Crusoe and Tallgrass announced the project in 2025 with plans that could eventually scale to roughly 10 gigawatts of capacity — enough, on paper, to rival a mid-sized regional power grid. Bloomberg reported in June that Google, as the undisclosed prospective customer, had raised concerns about the cost and construction timeline under Crusoe's management, and that Crusoe was being eased out even as it publicly described the move as a "pause." Local reporting by the Cowboy State Daily subsequently identified Google as the campus's owner and reported it had been renamed Project Tembo.

Friday's confirmation resolves that ambiguity. Google's Wyoming entry now rests on a web of agreements with regional utilities and infrastructure firms: Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power and Related Digital, according to Google's post. The most significant of those is a 20-year power purchase agreement with AEP, detailed in an October 14 press release, under which AEP plans to invest roughly $4 billion in a 702-megawatt fuel-cell plant using Bloom Energy technology. The plant will be owned through a project company, Cheyenne Fuel Cell LLC, in which AEP holds about 92 percent and funds advised by Basalt Infrastructure Partners hold the remainder. AEP said construction is expected to begin this year, with full operation targeted for the end of 2028, and that it plans to add carbon-capture equipment to limit emissions, piping captured gas to Tallgrass's regional sequestration hub.

Crusoe Moves On to Other Campuses

For Crusoe, losing the Wyoming site is a footnote rather than a setback. The company has been on an aggressive expansion run this fall: it raised a $3.9 billion Series F round in September, added Redwood Materials founder and Tesla board member JB Straubel and two other executives to its board, and signed a cloud-computing agreement with the trading firm Jane Street reported to be worth roughly $13 billion over five years. A September report pegged Crusoe's valuation at $30.9 billion.

Crusoe is still building a separate Google campus near Amarillo, Texas, and is developing a phased site in Abilene, Texas, for Oracle and OpenAI, with an adjacent 900-megawatt campus under construction for Microsoft. In its statement on the Wyoming sale, Crusoe co-founder and chief executive Chase Lochmiller framed the move as part of that broader buildout rather than a retreat.

Crusoe is "in the business of activating gigawatts for intelligence," Lochmiller said, adding that the company now has more than 6 gigawatts of capacity under contract and over 40 gigawatts in its development pipeline.

Who Stands to Be Affected

The practical stakes of the deal fall most heavily on Wyoming itself. Google said in its announcement that it expects to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local property-tax revenue for Laramie County and School District 1, and that it has met with more than 200 residents at a community meeting in Cheyenne and hosted a "Community Day" at the Cheyenne Children's Museum. The company said it is forming a community council with its infrastructure partners and would share further details on local commitments "in the coming weeks."

Utility customers and regulators have a stake as well. Google's pledge to cover 100 percent of the power costs tied to the project is designed to address a recurring objection from state regulators and residents nationwide: that existing ratepayers end up subsidizing the electricity demands of AI data centers. AEP's fuel-cell investment and the carbon-capture plans attached to it will also be watched closely, since the emissions benefit depends on technology — the capture and sequestration process — that has not yet been built at this scale.

The deal also lands against a backdrop of growing political friction over data center construction nationally, after several candidates campaigning against unchecked data center growth won local and state races in this week's elections. Google's emphasis, in its own announcement, on paying full power costs and limiting water use reflects the kind of commitments that have become standard talking points for hyperscalers trying to defuse local opposition before it reaches the ballot box.

What Comes Next

With ownership now settled, the practical timeline runs through AEP's fuel-cell plant, which is not expected to be fully operational until the end of 2028 — meaning the Cheyenne campus's actual computing capacity will not come online for at least two more years. Google has not given a construction start date or an in-service date for the data center itself. Crusoe, for its part, said it will keep developing other campuses for Google, Oracle, OpenAI and Microsoft, suggesting the company's role as a builder for hyperscale AI customers — rather than as a long-term owner of the sites it develops — will continue to define its business model going forward.