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On June 9, Crusoe Energy told investors its contracted AI infrastructure capacity was approaching 5 gigawatts — and in the same statement added that it had “paused development activities” on a 1.8 GW Wyoming campus “at the request of our customer.” Crusoe did not name the customer. Black Hills Corp, the utility serving the site, contradicted the word “paused” the next morning: the project “has not been paused,” it said, and remains “tracking for service to begin in early 2028.”

A month later, two county filings resolved the ambiguity. On July 8, the Laramie County Board of County Commissioners notified residents that “Crusoe Energy has withdrawn from the project” and that the campus — formerly called Project Jade — is now called Project Tembo. The party across the table is Google. A June 30 site plan filed by Google formalised the handover a week before the board meeting.

What Google Is Inheriting

Project Tembo sits on 716 acres outside Cheyenne. Four data center buildings. A 42-turbine natural gas fleet commissioned specifically for the campus. On-site fuel cells. More than $7 billion in committed power infrastructure. The campus was designed from the start to reach 1.8 GW of total capacity — a scale that puts it among the largest single AI compute sites in development anywhere in the United States.

Crusoe built the Wyoming site as a power-first neocloud, meaning the energy infrastructure came before the buildings. That design philosophy made the campus easy to repurpose for a hyperscaler once Crusoe exited. The power agreements, the turbine fleet, and the grid interconnection contracts transfer with the site plan.

Black Hills Corp’s clarification that the project had not paused — only changed hands — suggests the handover was planned, not a distressed exit. Crusoe’s simultaneous announcement that it was nearing 5 GW of contracted capacity points to the company redeploying its development capacity elsewhere rather than retreating.

Google’s Wyoming Posture

Google has not announced Project Tembo publicly. The name, the acreage, and the ownership transfer have emerged from county-level filings, utility communications, and the site plan document itself.

The acquisition follows a pattern Google has used repeatedly in 2026: securing large-scale AI compute capacity through third-party developers that took the permitting and construction risk first, then absorbing those sites once they are de-risked. The company has made public commitments exceeding $200 billion in AI capital expenditure for 2026 alone, and its TPU business — which now generates external revenue — requires dedicated infrastructure at gigawatt scale.

At 1.8 GW, Project Tembo is roughly 3.6 times the size of Google’s announced Texas data center commitments. Combined with Google’s known campuses in Virginia, Oregon, and South Carolina, the Wyoming site would represent a material addition to the company’s US compute footprint.

The early 2028 service date is unchanged.