Key takeaways
- Crusoe said on November 6 that Google acquired its data center site in southeast Wyoming; no price was given.
- Crusoe says it finished site selection, approvals and a power plan with Tallgrass Energy before the sale.
- TechCrunch reports Crusoe had tried and failed to sign Google as a customer for the project.
Crusoe said on November 6 that Google has acquired its data center site in southeast Wyoming, ending Crusoe's role in a project it had planned as a multi-gigawatt AI campus. Crusoe did not disclose a price. TechCrunch reported that Crusoe had tried and failed to sign Google as a customer for the site, and that Google now takes over development itself.
What Crusoe says
Crusoe says the sale completes its pre-development work: site selection, government approvals and a power plan. It built that plan with Tallgrass Energy. It mixes fuel cells, grid power and natural gas turbines, with a longer-term idea of capturing carbon through Tallgrass's regional CO2 storage hub.
Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lochmiller, said the company has "set up the Wyoming project for construction and eventual operation." The announcement gives no acreage or power figure for the site and does not say what Google plans to build.
What the reporting adds
TechCrunch says the project was announced with Tallgrass, which Blackstone backs, with a plan to grow it to 10 gigawatts. It says Google had reportedly worried about cost and the construction timeline under Crusoe's management, and that Google had earlier announced plans to invest $17 billion in the campus. Bloomberg also covered the sale, according to Techmeme's summary of its report.
Crusoe still has large customers elsewhere, including Oracle and OpenAI at its Abilene, Texas campus, per TechCrunch. It is also building a separate data center for Google near Amarillo, Texas.
Why it matters
Building a data center for AI takes land, power approvals and equipment, and a developer can finish the first two and still lose the project to the buyer it was meant for. Here the customer ended up buying the site. The sale also comes in the same week that AI stocks fell sharply and investors questioned how data center projects will be financed, as we covered in our reports on the Nvidia and CoreWeave moves.
What to watch: whether Google says what it will build in Wyoming, and what it paid.