CHEYENNE, Wyo. — According to the city’s mayor, an artificial intelligence data center will be built near Cheyenne soon, using more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to up to five times its size.
“This is a game changer. “It’s huge,” Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday.
Wyoming’s capital has become a computing powerhouse, thanks to cool weather (which helps keep computer temperatures low) and an abundance of low-cost electricity from a top energy-producing state.
Since 2012, the city has been home to Microsoft data centers. Collins said the $800 million data center announced by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms last year is nearing completion.
According to a joint company statement, Tallgrass, a regional energy infrastructure company, and Crusoe, an AI data center developer, will start with 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and scale up to 10 gigawatts.
A gigawatt can power up to one million homes. However, there are more homes than people in Wyoming. Wyoming, the least populous state, has approximately 590,000 people.
It also exports a significant amount of energy. Wyoming, a top producer of coal, oil, and gas, is the fourth highest net energy-producing state in the United States, trailing only Texas, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Wyoming generates approximately 12 times more energy than it consumes, including fossil fuels. According to the EIA, the state exports nearly three-fifths of its electricity production.
However, because this proposed data center is so large, it would require its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.
Gov. Mark Gordon praised the project’s significance for the state’s gas industry.
“This is exciting news for Wyoming and its natural gas producers,” Gordon said in a statement.
While data centers consume a lot of energy, experts say that companies can help reduce their environmental impact by using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. Nonetheless, electricity customers may see their bills rise as utilities prepare for massive data projects on the grid.
The data center would be built several miles (kilometers) south of Cheyenne, off US 85 near the Colorado state line. State and local regulators would need to approve the project, but Collins was optimistic that construction could begin soon.
“I believe their plans are to go sooner rather than later,” he said.
OpenAI, the Chat GPT developer, has been looking for sites for a massive AI data center project called Stargate in the United States, but a Crusoe spokesperson declined to comment on whether the Cheyenne project was one.
“We are not yet ready to announce our tenant there,” said the spokesperson, Andrew Schmitt. “I can’t confirm or deny that is going to be one of the stargate.”
Recently, OpenAI announced that it had turned on the first phase of a Crusoe-built data center complex in Abilene, Texas, in collaboration with software giant Oracle.
“To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest data center—we think of it as a campus—in the world,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, told The Associated Press last week. “It generates, roughly and depending how you count, about a gigawatt of energy.”
OpenAI has also been looking for other locations in the United States to expand its data centers. It announced last week that it has signed an agreement with Oracle to develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity.
“We’re now in a position where we have, in a really concrete way, identified over five gigawatts of energy that we’re going to be able to build around,” Lehane told the audience.
OpenAI has not named any of the locations where it intends to build data centers, aside from its flagship site in Texas.
As of earlier this year, Wyoming was not one of the 16 states where OpenAI said it was looking for new data centers.
