Google's $17bn Wyoming data centre bets on gas and carbon capture

Google has announced a $17 billion data centre in Laramie County, Wyoming, its first in the state. The site will be powered by a 702 MW fuel-cell development contracted with American Electric Power (AEP), with carbon capture and storage attached. Google said the project is the largest planned development of its kind.

The power build-out is more than the fuel cells. Google said Bloom Energy will make the fuel cells. Gas generators run by Tallgrass Energy and Black Hills Energy will also supply the site, and Tallgrass is conducting a front-end engineering study on adding carbon capture to its combined-cycle turbines. Captured CO2 will be stored permanently at Tallgrass's Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. Google says its total contracted carbon capture capacity will reach nearly 1 GW.

AEP said last month that it plans to invest $4 billion in the project. Google says the site will be air-cooled and will generate "hundreds of millions of dollars" in local property taxes for Laramie County and School District 1. The blog post gives no construction timeline, completion date or job count.

The announcement arrives two days after voters in 40 of 41 local US ballot measures backed restrictions on data centre projects, according to coverage by RuntimeWire. One report says Crusoe was pushed out of the project over Google's concerns about costs and timelines. That claim comes from a single source citing unnamed people, and Google has not confirmed it.

For Google, the deal secures scale and power in a state with cheap land and a regulatory path that favours gas. The carbon capture commitment also gives it a sustainability claim that gas-only rivals will struggle to match at this size. The bigger signal is the gap between the build-out and local politics: a large tax base and more than 200 residents at a Cheyenne community meeting are not the same as local consent, and the voter results suggest that gap is widening.

Watch three things: whether Google's promised community partnership details arrive "in the coming weeks", how AEP and Tallgrass execute the power and capture work, and whether the Crusoe account is confirmed or denied. Each will shape how quickly other hyperscalers copy the gas-plus-capture model.