Google Buys Crusoe's Troubled Wyoming Data Center Project

Google has bought an unfinished data center project in southeastern Wyoming from Crusoe, the Denver-based developer valued at $30.9 billion confirmed Friday.

Google is now taking over the site it had originally declined to lease. According to reports, Google raised concerns about the project's cost and construction timeline under Crusoe's management before walking away as a prospective customer — and later buying the development outright.

Neither company disclosed the purchase price for the unfinished site. Google did announce its own plan: a $17 billion investment to develop the data center campus.

What does the deal reveal about the data center business?

The transaction shows how hard it is for independent data center developers to deliver massive projects on time and on budget. Securing equipment and power remains the core challenge. Growing opposition from local communities can complicate development further.

Crusoe first announced the Wyoming project last year with Tallgrass, an infrastructure company backed by Blackstone. The two planned to scale the site to 10 gigawatts of power capacity. That ambition now belongs to Google.

Bloomberg first reported the sale talks in June. The setback didn't slow Crusoe's fundraising: the company raised a $3.9 billion round in September.

How does Crusoe make its money?

The eight-year-old company runs three revenue lines:

• Leasing data center space to customers that bring their own GPUs
• Renting out its own GPUs
• Selling compute power for running AI models, a workload known as inference

Its largest projects serve some of the biggest names in AI. The Abilene, Texas campus is being built in phases for Oracle and OpenAI. Next door, Crusoe is constructing a separate 900-megawatt campus for Microsoft, with the first building expected online in mid-2027. Meta is also a customer.

Bloomberg reported that trading firm Jane Street signed a $13 billion, five-year cloud deal with Crusoe — one of the largest commercial commitments by an independent AI infrastructure provider.

Is Google done with Crusoe?

No. Despite absorbing the Wyoming facility, Google hasn't cut ties. Crusoe is developing another data center for Google near Amarillo, Texas, meaning the two companies remain partners on one site even after Google took direct control of the other.

That split — buying one project, commissioning another — suggests hyperscalers will cherry-pick: take over developments they consider too risky to leave with a third party, while still outsourcing capacity elsewhere when the economics work.

Who built Crusoe?

Chase Lochmiller, now CEO, and Cully Cavness founded the company as a cryptocurrency-mining business powered by natural gas that would otherwise have been burned off. The pivot from flared-gas mining to AI infrastructure put Crusoe at the center of the compute boom.

In September, alongside the $3.9 billion round, Crusoe added three board members. One of them is JB Straubel, the Redwood Materials founder and Tesla board member who invested in Crusoe back in 2021. Crusoe later became the first customer of Straubel's energy-storage business.

For Google, the $17 billion Wyoming bet deepens its push to own AI compute capacity directly. For independent developers like Crusoe, the deal cuts both ways: losing a flagship project to a customer-turned-buyer stings, but a $3.9 billion war chest and a customer list spanning OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft and Meta suggest the setback hasn't dented investor confidence.