Google said on Nov. 5 that it will spend $17 billion to build its first data center in Wyoming, a sprawling campus south of Cheyenne that the company is betting will give it cheap, reliable power for the AI workloads straining its cloud business. The announcement, detailed in a post on Google's corporate blog, lands the company in a state that has so far kept a lower profile in the AI data center race than Texas, Virginia or Ohio.
The 716-acre site sits in the Switchgrass Industrial Park, about eight miles south of Cheyenne, on land Google acquired from Crusoe Energy, which had paused its own data center plans there earlier this year. Google's design calls for four data halls plus an office building and supporting logistics and network facilities, with construction unfolding in phases. The company has set a target of 2031 for the campus to reach full build-out, though it has not said when the first hall will come online or disclosed the facility's eventual power capacity.
To keep the lights on, Google lined up four partners: Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power and the real-estate developer Related Digital. The company says it will cover the full cost of the electricity the site consumes rather than pushing those costs onto other ratepayers, a commitment utilities and regulators elsewhere have increasingly demanded of data center operators. Part of the power is slated to come from new natural-gas fuel cells built by AEP that use carbon capture, with the captured emissions piped to a sequestration hub Tallgrass operates nearby. Google also says the campus will rely on air cooling rather than water-intensive systems, a response to criticism that data centers strain local water supplies.
Power, taxes and a reluctant electorate
Local officials are leaning on the fiscal upside. Google has told Laramie County and School District 1 to expect hundreds of millions of dollars in new property tax revenue over the life of the project, along with more than a thousand construction jobs and over 200 permanent positions once the campus is running. For a county of roughly 100,000 people, that is a significant infusion, and it echoes the pitch hyperscalers have made to small communities across the country as they race to secure sites for power-hungry AI infrastructure.
But the timing is awkward. Google's announcement came just days after voters in dozens of American communities used last week's elections to push back on exactly this kind of development. According to Ballotpedia's tracking of 2026 data center ballot measures, voters rejected the large majority of the roughly 40 local measures on November's ballots, many of which would have eased zoning or tax rules to attract exactly the kind of campus Google is now building. A University of Wyoming poll cited in local coverage found only about 30% of state residents support more large AI data centers, and some state lawmakers have begun pressing for tighter review of the industry's water and power demands. Google's project missed the ballot itself, since Cheyenne-area officials had not put a comparable measure to voters, but it arrives into a political climate markedly more skeptical than the one hyperscalers encountered even a year ago.
What happens next
Google says Wyoming is not a one-off: the company has signaled it intends to announce further U.S. sites as it works to keep pace with Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, all of which have unveiled multibillion-dollar data center campuses of their own this year to support the compute needs of generative AI models. For now, the Cheyenne project's immediate next steps are permitting and the start of site work; Google has not published a construction timeline for the first of the four planned data halls. Whether the promised tax revenue and jobs are enough to blunt the broader backlash the ballot results revealed is likely to become a template question for every hyperscaler chasing the next data center site.
