“Blue Wave” puts pressure on AI infrastructure prospects, Google (GOOGL.US) bucked the trend: plans to invest 17 billion US dollars to build a data center in Wyoming

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.US) will spend 17 billion US dollars to build a data center in Wyoming to officially bid for this goal. Two days ago, voters across the US just gave a broad response to the development of such large-scale artificial intelligence projects in the midterm elections.

According to Ballotpedia statistics, in the US midterm elections on Tuesday, the party that limited the data center won 40 of the 41 local referendums relating to data centers. In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa promised to stop data center construction and won the gubernatorial election; Democratic candidates who won the Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania gubernatorial elections also sought to strengthen regulation of such projects.

Google said in a blog post on Thursday that the data center is located in Laramie County (Laramie County) in Wyoming and will be the company's first facility in the state. Partners include Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power Company (AEP.US), and Related Digital. The company says it will pay for all the electricity consumed by the data center, expect to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes, and will also form a community committee with partners in Cheyenne (Cheyenne) to address growth concerns.

In terms of electricity, the project will partly rely on a planned 702 MW natural gas fuel cell power generation project. The fuel cells are supplied by Bloom Energy (BE.US) and equipped with carbon capture and storage technology; the data center uses air cooling to reduce water use. American Electric last month said it plans to invest $4 billion in the project. This reflects tech companies' growing interest in Bloom's fuel cells — orders for gas turbines have been scheduled for years, the licensing and construction of a nuclear power plant may take more than a decade, and Bloom says its fuel cells can be installed in as fast as 90 days.

According to reports in June, people familiar with the matter claimed that data center developer Crusoe was squeezed out of the project site selection because Google had concerns about costs and timelines; Black Hills, a utility company that was in the process of preparing a power agreement for the project at the time, said it would continue to move forward without Crusoe. Crusoe initially announced the Wyoming project with Blackstone-backed infrastructure company Tallgrass in July 2025, and its CEO Chase Lochmiller said at the time that the park would eventually expand to 10 gigawatts. One gigawatt of electricity is enough to supply 750,000 American households at the same time.

Wyoming is the Republican Party's iron box, and Trump won more than 70% of the presidential vote in 2024.

The announcement comes at a time when investors are re-evaluating the pace of AI infrastructure construction. Meanwhile, Microsoft has declined to expand its data center agreement with AI cloud service provider Nscale in Texas; according to Bloomberg News earlier, Microsoft is also planning to increase supervision of neocloud vendors Nebius, IREN, and some Nscale data center projects.