Google’s first Wyoming data centre will run on gas with carbon capture

Google will build its first Wyoming data centre, a $17B investment near Cheyenne. Most of its power will come from natural gas, including a 702 MW fuel cell plant from AEP and Bloom Energy, with carbon capture meant to store most emissions underground.

Google will build its first data centre in Wyoming, a long-term $17B investment in Laramie County, the company said on Thursday. Much of its power will come from natural gas, with carbon capture meant to keep most of the emissions out of the air. It follows a $15B plan for Malaysia that Google announced on Wednesday.

The main source is a 702 MW fuel cell plant from American Electric Power, which turns natural gas into electricity without burning it. AEP said in October it would spend about $4B on the Bloom Energy plant near Cheyenne. Google will buy its power under a 20-year deal, POWER Magazine reported, and the plant should be fully running by the end of 2028.

Carbon from the fuel cells will be captured and stored underground at Tallgrass Energy’s nearby Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. Google says this will remove “a large majority” of the plant’s emissions, but has not given a figure. It calls the plant the largest of its kind planned so far.

Google will also buy power from gas plants run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy, and is studying whether carbon capture can be fitted to Tallgrass’s turbines. With Wyoming, its contracted power from plants with carbon capture reaches nearly 1 GW. Its first such deal, for a gas plant in Illinois, came in October 2025.

Google says it will pay for all the power it uses and the grid upgrades its growth requires, something US lawmakers want Big Tech to do. The data centre will be air-cooled to save water.

Water is a sore point in Cheyenne. In July, the city halted some data centre water discharges after a Meta contractor released a rare bacterium into its wastewater reuse system.

Google expects the project to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes for the county and its schools. It and its partners are also setting up a community council, after more than 200 residents raised worries about how data centre growth is changing Cheyenne. Google announced the project two days after US voters rejected data centres in 40 of 41 local ballot measures.