TECHNOLOGY
An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.
“It’s a game changer. It’s huge,” Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday.
With cool weather—good for keeping computer temperatures down—and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming’s capital has become a hub of computing power.
The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.
The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement.
A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that’s more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people.
And it’s a major exporter of energy. A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA.
But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.- TX
