Google Takes Over Crusoe's Unfinished Wyoming Data Center

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Google has bought an unfinished data center project in southeastern Wyoming from Crusoe, the developer that announced it. Crusoe confirmed the sale on Friday.

What changed hands

Crusoe is an eight-year-old developer based in Denver and recently valued at $30.9 billion. It announced the Wyoming project last year together with Tallgrass, an infrastructure company backed by Blackstone. The plan was to scale the campus to 10 gigawatts of power capacity.

The purchase price is not public. Google says it will put $17 billion into building out the campus.

Why the project left Crusoe

Crusoe had hoped to land Google as a customer for the site, and that did not happen. Google is now taking the project over. It reportedly had concerns about the cost and the construction schedule while Crusoe ran it.

The sale was first reported in June. It did not stop Crusoe from raising $3.9 billion in September.

A relationship that continues

Google has not walked away from Crusoe. Another Google data center, near Amarillo, Texas, is also in Crusoe's hands.

TechCrunch reads the deal as a sign that independent developers struggle to finish giant projects on schedule and on budget, partly because equipment and power are hard to secure. Local opposition can add to the trouble.

Who Crusoe builds for

Crusoe has three revenue lines: it leases data center space to customers that supply their own GPUs, rents out GPUs it owns, and sells inference, the compute that runs AI models.

Its Abilene, Texas, campus is going up in phases for Oracle and OpenAI. Next door, a separate 900-megawatt campus for Microsoft is under construction, with the first building due online in mid-2027. Meta is also a customer.

Bloomberg reported that trading firm Jane Street signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud deal with Crusoe.

Chase Lochmiller, now the CEO, and Cully Cavness founded the company as a cryptocurrency-mining business. Its power came from natural gas that was otherwise being burned off.

Source: TechCrunch