Google Acquires Unfinished Wyoming Data Center Project From Crusoe
Google takes over Crusoe's delayed Wyoming data center project, committing $17 billion to develop the facility after timeline and cost concerns.
Google has officially acquired an unfinished data center project in southeastern Wyoming from Denver-based Crusoe. The transaction follows reports that Google opted out of becoming a tenant at the location due to concerns surrounding project timelines and rising construction costs under Crusoe’s management. While the exact purchase price was not disclosed, Google announced plans to dedicate $17 billion toward developing the data center campus.
Crusoe, an eight-year-old firm recently valued at $30.9 billion, initially announced the Wyoming initiative last year alongside Tallgrass, an infrastructure company backed by Blackstone. The original project design aimed to eventually scale the site to an ambitious 10 gigawatts of power capacity. However, the takeover underscores the operational strain independent developers face when attempting to secure power, source specialized hardware, and address local community opposition for massive construction efforts.
A strategic shift in infrastructure development
Despite stepping in to take control of the Wyoming site, Google is not ending its relationship with Crusoe. The Denver-based developer is currently building a separate data center facility for Google near Amarillo, Texas. Bloomberg first reported the potential sale of the Wyoming site in June, though the setback did not prevent Crusoe from closing a $3.9 billion funding round in September.
Crusoe was originally founded by Chief Executive Officer Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness as a cryptocurrency-mining business powered by natural gas that would otherwise have been flared off. The company has since expanded into leasing data center space to clients who supply their own GPUs, renting out its own hardware, and selling compute power used for running AI models, known as inference.
Expanding client portfolio and board backing
Crusoe continues to manage massive hardware developments across the United States. Its primary campus in Abilene, Texas, is being constructed in phases to serve Oracle and OpenAI. Directly adjacent to that site, Crusoe is building a separate 900-megawatt campus for Microsoft, with the first facility expected to operationalize in mid-2027. Meta is also a key client, while financial trading firm Jane Street reportedly completed a five-year cloud contract with Crusoe valued at $13 billion.
To support its ongoing expansion, Crusoe added three new board members alongside its September capital raise. Among them is JB Straubel, founder of Redwood Materials and Tesla board member, who initially invested in Crusoe in 2021. Crusoe later became the first commercial customer for Straubel’s energy-storage business.
What it means for developers
The handover of the Wyoming site highlights the intense physical bottlenecks involved in scaling hardware infrastructure for modern compute demands. Securing power capacity, navigating local approval, and keeping construction timelines on schedule are becoming critical operational risks. When independent developers face delays, it can disrupt the downstream availability of dedicated compute clusters.
As physical infrastructure challenges scale up behind the scenes, developers looking to integrate intelligence into their software without handling infrastructure can try top AI models cheaply through one API at https://apixoai.online.
Direct acquisitions by hyperscalers like Google indicate that tech giants are willing to take over physical execution to guarantee their long-term supply of compute capacity. For software teams, this consolidation ensures that multi-billion-dollar backends remain supported by major capital, even as independent infrastructure providers navigate complex construction environments.
Source: Crusoe sells troubled Wyoming data center project to Google — TechCrunch AI. Written by the Apixo team from that report.
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