Data centre company Crusoe announced on Friday 6 November that Google had acquired its data centre site in south-east Wyoming. The sale ends Crusoe’s part in the project’s early phase, the company said: it chose the site, obtained the permits and designed the energy solution. Google did not disclose the price, TechCrunch reported.

Crusoe and energy company Tallgrass announced the project last year. DCD reported that the campus, known as Project Jade, was then a 1.8-gigawatt project that could be expanded to 10 gigawatts. DCD also reported that Crusoe paused work in June ‘at the request of our customer’.

TechCrunch gives a different account: Crusoe tried and failed to land Google as a customer for the project. Google is taking over the project after it had reportedly been concerned about its cost and construction timeline under Crusoe’s management, the publication said. Bloomberg first reported the deal in June, TechCrunch wrote.

Power from natural gas fuel cells

Google announced the project in a blog post on 5 November. The campus is to be powered by a 702-megawatt fuel cell plant from American Electric Power (AEP). A fuel cell generates electricity from fuel electrochemically, without burning it. Here the fuel is natural gas. Bloom Energy makes the cells. AEP owns and operates the plant, DCD reported; Google signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with AEP in October.

The plant includes carbon capture and storage (CCS). Google said most of the plant’s emissions will be captured and stored permanently underground at Tallgrass’s nearby storage hub. The company also said the plant is the first of its kind and the largest planned to date.

Google is also buying electricity from gas power plants run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy. The turbines at Tallgrass’s combined-cycle plants do not yet have carbon capture: Google is only now examining, in a design study, whether they could be fitted with it. To save water, Google will cool the data centre with air. Google promises to pay for all the electricity it uses.

Capacity and timeline

Google did not disclose the campus’s capacity. Citing earlier reports, DCD said it could total up to 2.7 gigawatts.

The campus will be built on a site of about 290 hectares, some 13 kilometres south of Cheyenne, DCD reported. The permit application shows four data halls, and construction is slated to be completed by 2031. Google expects the project to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes for Laramie County and the local school district.

The deal highlights how hard it can be for independent data centre developers to finish giant projects on time and on budget, TechCrunch said. The partnership continues, however: Crusoe is building another data centre for Google near Amarillo, Texas.