Google takes over Crusoe's Wyoming data center site, lines up a $17 billion build

What happened

After the AI infrastructure startup failed to nail down clients, Alphabet's Google assumed control of a Crusoe-owned data center location in southeast Wyoming. In a Friday statement, Crusoe said the transaction concludes its early-stage role that covered picking the site, obtaining government sign-offs, and crafting the power plan.

Terms were not disclosed. Google, for its part, said Thursday it will put $17 billion into the Wyoming facility.

In June, Bloomberg said Crusoe was being pushed out after it could not land customers, including Google, for a project expected to draw power on the scale of the city of Denver. The developer had publicly framed the effort as paused, but people familiar told Bloomberg it faced pressure to exit after Google raised concerns about cost and timeline.

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The project and the scale

Crusoe introduced the Wyoming build in July 2025 with Tallgrass, the Blackstone Inc.-backed infrastructure firm. CEO Chase Lochmiller said the complex could ultimately reach 10 gigawatts, which he described as enough juice for around 7.5 million households at once. The plan called for tapping Tallgrass pipelines for natural gas and water in the area.

The industry backdrop

The data center rush is meeting real bottlenecks, from long lead times on equipment to hard caps on power, which put at risk the outlook for a wave of inexperienced developers who piled into the AI buildout. Those hurdles grew this week after several newly elected US governors pledged to slow the spread of large campuses that supply computing for AI systems.

Why it matters for your portfolio

Big picture, Google is committing $17 billion to this site while timelines, budgets, and power access decide who actually gets capacity built. Crusoe, meanwhile, says it still has north of 6 gigawatts contracted and more than 40 gigawatts in its pipeline, and it recently said it is developing a Google data center campus in Armstrong County, Texas. The bottom line: scale players with power plans and political clearance look better positioned than newcomers when capital gets choosy.

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