Google Wyoming data center: a $17B AI campus that runs on gas

Felix Laurent 5 Nov 2026 5 min read

Big tech

Google is building its first Wyoming data center, a $17 billion campus near Cheyenne designed for up to 2.7 GW of computing. The company announced it on November 5. The project is part of Google's race to add AI compute, and most of its power will come from natural gas.

Google's announcement does not use the word AI. Its financial filings do. Alphabet says demand for its AI services exceeds the compute it has. Its spending on servers and data centers has more than doubled this year. Wyoming is one of the places where that money is going.

Why Google needs more AI compute

Alphabet spent $132 billion on property and equipment in the first nine months of 2026. A year earlier, the figure was $63.6 billion. Most of it goes to technical infrastructure: servers, network gear and data center construction.

In June, Alphabet raised $80 billion in new equity, including $10 billion from Berkshire Hathaway. The money would fund "AI compute infrastructure to meet its unprecedented customer demand," the company said. Demand was "exceeding the company's available supply," it added.

The numbers behind that demand are large. In the first quarter, Google Cloud revenue grew 63% and its backlog nearly doubled to more than $460 billion. Google's model APIs processed 19 billion tokens per minute, six times more than a year earlier.

Power has become the hard limit. Alphabet's latest quarterly report lists long-term energy agreements among its big obligations. It signed them "to meet both internal and customer AI compute capacity demands," the report says. The Wyoming campus shows what such a deal looks like on the ground.

What Google is building in Wyoming

The campus was first known as Project Jade. Crusoe, an AI infrastructure startup, was developing it as a 1.8 GW site that could grow to 10 GW. In June, Crusoe paused work "at the request of our customer." In July, local outlet Cowboy State Daily revealed that the customer was Google.

Google now develops the site itself through a subsidiary, under the name Project Tembo. According to Data Center Dynamics, it covers 716 acres eight miles south of Cheyenne. The plans include four data halls, and construction is slated to finish by 2031.

Google's post names four partners: Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power (AEP) and Related Digital. It also makes several promises to the county:

power costs: Google will pay for 100% of the power it uses and the grid upgrades its growth requires;
water: the data center will be air-cooled to limit strain on local water;
taxes: it expects hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes for Laramie County and its schools;
community council: Google and its partners will set up a council on how data center growth affects Cheyenne.

Feeding a campus of this size is the hardest part of the project.

How Google will power its AI campus in Wyoming

Google's power comes from three sources. The table sums up what is known.

Source	Operator	Capacity	Status
Fuel cells with carbon capture	AEP, Bloom Energy fuel cells	702 MW	Full operation by end of 2028
Gas generators	Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy	Not disclosed	No carbon capture yet
Carbon capture for gas turbines	Tallgrass Energy	Not disclosed	Engineering study only

AEP announced the fuel cell plant on October 14. It expects the plant to cost about $4 billion, and construction starts in 2026. Google will buy its output under a 20-year power purchase agreement. Google calls it the largest planned project of its kind.

Fuel cells turn natural gas into electricity through a chemical reaction, without burning it. Bloom says this is more efficient and cuts emissions. The process still produces carbon dioxide, which is why the plant needs carbon capture.

The 702 MW plant covers about a quarter of the campus's planned 2.7 GW. The rest will have to come from the gas generators and the grid. How clean that power is depends on the carbon capture.

How much carbon the capture will remove

Carbon from the fuel cells will go to Tallgrass's Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub nearby. It will be stored permanently underground. Google says the system will capture "a large majority" of the emissions, but gives no percentage.

The gas generators from Tallgrass and Black Hills have no carbon capture yet. Google is only studying whether Tallgrass's combined cycle turbines can be fitted with it. Until then, that part of the supply is ordinary gas power.

Google has done this once before. In October 2025, it agreed to buy most of the power from Broadwing, a 400 MW gas plant with carbon capture in Illinois. That plant is set to capture more than 90% of its emissions and start in 2029. With Wyoming, Google's contracted capacity from plants with carbon capture reaches nearly 1 GW.

Neither project runs yet, so the capture rates remain targets. The location adds its own pressures.

Why AI companies come to Cheyenne

Wyoming's capital has become a hub for AI infrastructure. Microsoft broke ground on a campus there in 2025, and Meta is finishing an $800 million campus south of the city. Related Digital is building a $1.2 billion data center for CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents out AI chips. Wyoming also produces natural gas, which these campuses increasingly use for their own power.

Water has become a sore point. This year, Cheyenne traced a rare bacterium in its reuse water system to a contractor at Meta's site. In July, the city suspended data center discharges, and two water reclamation plants went offline for cleaning. Google's choice of air cooling answers that worry directly.

Politics adds pressure too. Data center projects faced votes across the US this week, and OpenAI is weighing cuts to its 2027 capacity after the midterms. Google says it met more than 200 residents before the announcement. Its pledge to pay the full cost of power matches what many lawmakers now demand from AI companies.

What Google's Wyoming data center says about the cost of AI

It shows that AI compute now runs largely on natural gas. Google cannot get gigawatts from the grid fast enough, so it is building its own gas supply next to the campus. Only the fuel cell plant comes with carbon capture from the start, and Google has not said what share of emissions it will remove.

The local commitments are more concrete. Google will cool the campus with air and pay for its own power and grid upgrades, which answers Cheyenne's main worries about water and bills. For Alphabet, $17 billion is a small part of a spending plan that has already passed $130 billion this year. For the climate, the result depends on whether carbon capture works at this scale, and the first answer comes at the end of 2028.