Google grabs Crusoe's unfinished Wyoming data center, pledges $17B buildout

Crusoe confirmed Friday that it has sold an unfinished data center project in southeastern Wyoming to Google. The Denver-based developer had spent time courting Google as a customer for the site and came up empty — so now Google owns the place instead.

Google didn't say what it paid Crusoe for the half-built campus, but it did put a number on its own ambitions there: $17 billion to develop the data center. According to reports, Google grew uneasy about the project's cost and construction schedule under Crusoe's watch before taking the reins.

The Wyoming site was announced last year alongside Tallgrass, a Blackstone-backed infrastructure company, with plans to eventually reach 10 gigawatts of power capacity. The handoff is a blunt reminder of how hard it is for independent developers to deliver mega-projects on time and on budget when equipment, power and local pushback all get in the way.

Crusoe isn't walking away from Google entirely. It's building another data center for the search giant near Amarillo, Texas. And the Wyoming stumble didn't slow the money train — Crusoe still raised a $3.9 billion round in September. Bloomberg first reported the sale in June.

Crusoe, now eight years old and valued at $30.9 billion, makes its money three ways: leasing data center space to customers who bring their own GPUs, renting out its own GPUs, and selling inference compute for running AI models. Its biggest builds serve AI's heaviest hitters — the Abilene, Texas campus is going up in phases for Oracle and OpenAI, with a separate 900-megawatt campus next door for Microsoft whose first building is expected online in mid-2027. Meta is a customer too, and Bloomberg reported that trading firm Jane Street signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud deal with the company.

Crusoe started life as a natural gas-powered crypto mining outfit, founded by CEO Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness, using gas that would otherwise have been flared off. In September it added three board members, including JB Straubel — the Redwood Materials founder and Tesla board member who backed Crusoe in 2021 and later made it the first customer of his energy-storage business.