Google acquires Crusoe's Wyoming AI data center site a day after $17 billion campus announcement

Crusoe said on November 6, 2026 that Google has acquired its data center site in southeast Wyoming. The deal completes the AI infrastructure company’s pre-development work on the campus — site selection, government approvals, and power strategy — and it came a day after Google announced a $17 billion long-term investment in its first Wyoming data center. The financial terms were not disclosed, Reuters reported.

What Google is building in Wyoming

Google announced on November 5 that it will build its first Wyoming data center in Laramie County, in partnership with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power, and Related Digital. The 716-acre site, known locally as Project Tembo, sits in the Switchgrass Industrial Park about eight miles south of Cheyenne.

Power is the centerpiece. Google has contracted with AEP for a 702-megawatt fuel-cell development with carbon capture and storage, using Bloom Energy fuel cells, and says it will pay for 100% of the power the campus uses. The facility will be air-cooled to limit pressure on local water supplies. The campus itself is not new: Crusoe and Tallgrass introduced it in July 2025 as a 1.8-gigawatt AI data-center campus designed for expansion to as much as 10 gigawatts.

Google is not the only one racing for power and space: LG CNS finished a 30 MW AI data centre in Jakarta this month, fully booked before completion, with a 400 MW expansion next.

A handoff, not a groundbreaking

Crusoe chief executive Chase Lochmiller framed the deal as the end of the origination phase. “Crusoe’s pre-construction efforts – origination, entitlement, and de-risking – have set up the Wyoming project for construction and eventual operation,” he said in the announcement. Crusoe and Tallgrass developed the campus’s hybrid power strategy together, combining fuel cells, grid power, and natural gas turbines, with a long-term roadmap for carbon capture at Tallgrass’s regional CO2 sequestration hub.

Nothing in the announcement sets a construction start or an opening date. Bloomberg reported that Google took on the project after Crusoe struggled to secure customers for it — a reminder that the AI buildout’s bottleneck is increasingly who will pay for the power, not who can pour the concrete.

Crusoe is not walking away from Google. The company is also the developer of Google’s data center campus under construction in Armstrong County, outside Amarillo, Texas. Lochmiller said Crusoe has more than 6 gigawatts of contracted capacity and over 40 gigawatts in its development pipeline.

Why the handoff matters

The deal lands in the same week the industry started writing its own rules for the data-center boom. OpenAI published a National Community Compact on November 5, pledging that its AI campuses will pay their own power bills and shoulder the infrastructure their growth requires. Google made a similar pitch in Wyoming, saying it will cover 100% of the power the campus uses and pay hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes.

The pattern is now familiar: developers originate the sites, line up the power, and hand the keys to a hyperscaler. Naver signed a $9 billion AI infrastructure deal with Brookfield in October. The question for Wyoming is what comes next — the fuel-cell plant powering the campus is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of 2028, but Google has given no construction schedule or opening date for the campus itself.