Google takes over Crusoe’s unfinished Wyoming data center

Google did not disclose what it paid for the project. It said it plans to invest $17 billion to develop the data center campus. Crusoe had initially announced the project last year with Tallgrass, an infrastructure company backed by Blackstone, and had tried unsuccessfully to secure Google as a customer for it.

The handover underscores the challenges independent developers face in delivering large data centers on schedule and within budget, including securing equipment and power. Local opposition can also complicate projects. Bloomberg first reported the planned sale in June.

Crusoe continues to work with Google on a separate data center near Amarillo, Texas. The Wyoming deal also came ahead of Crusoe’s $3.9 billion funding round in September. The eight-year-old company was recently valued at $30.9 billion.

Crusoe leases data center space to customers with their own GPUs, rents out its GPUs and sells computing power for running AI models, known as inference. Its Abilene, Texas, campus is being built in phases for Oracle and OpenAI. The company is also constructing a separate 900-megawatt campus nearby for Microsoft, with the first building expected to come online in mid-2027. Meta is another customer, and Bloomberg reported that trading firm Jane Street signed a five-year, $13 billion cloud deal with Crusoe.

CEO Chase Lochmiller co-founded Crusoe with Cully Cavness as a cryptocurrency-mining business powered by natural gas that otherwise would have been burned off. In September, alongside its funding round, Crusoe added three board members, including JB Straubel, founder of Redwood Materials and a Tesla board member. Straubel invested in Crusoe in 2021; Crusoe later became the first customer of his energy-storage business.