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Business·2 min read

Google Plans $17B Wyoming Data Centre Powered by Gas and Carbon Capture

Google will build its first Wyoming data centre near Cheyenne, a $17B project powered mainly by natural gas, including a 702 MW fuel cell plant with carbon capture.

Aerial view of a large data centre campus on the plains near Cheyenne, Wyoming, with power infrastructure in the foreground.
Image: TNW | Google
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Google will build its first data centre in Wyoming, a long-term $17B investment in Laramie County near Cheyenne, the company said on Thursday. Most of the power will come from natural gas, with carbon capture meant to keep the bulk of the emissions out of the atmosphere. The announcement follows a $15B plan for Malaysia that Google unveiled a day earlier.

A 702 MW fuel cell plant at the core

The main source is a 702 MW fuel cell plant from American Electric Power, built with Bloom Energy technology, which converts natural gas into electricity without burning it. AEP said in October it would spend about $4B on the plant. Google will buy the power under a 20-year agreement, and the plant should be fully operational by the end of 2028.

Carbon from the fuel cells will be captured and stored underground at Tallgrass Energy's nearby Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. Google says this will remove "a large majority" of the plant's emissions but has not given a figure. It describes the plant as the largest of its kind planned so far.

Google will also buy electricity from gas plants run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy, and it is studying whether carbon capture can be added to Tallgrass's turbines. With Wyoming, its contracted power from plants with carbon capture reaches nearly 1 GW. The first such deal, for a gas plant in Illinois, dates to October 2025.

Water, costs and local pushback

Google says it will pay for all the power it uses and for the grid upgrades its growth requires, something US lawmakers want Big Tech to do. The data centre will be air-cooled to save water, a sensitive point in Cheyenne: in July the city halted some data centre water discharges after a Meta contractor released a rare bacterium into its wastewater reuse system.

The company expects the project to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes for the county and its schools. It and its partners are also setting up a community council, after more than 200 residents raised concerns about how data centre growth is changing Cheyenne.

The timing is notable. Google announced the project two days after US voters rejected data centres in 40 of 41 local ballot measures.

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Tags:googlewyomingdata centernatural gascarbon capturebloom energy

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