Google said it plans to spend $17 billion (£12.6bn) to build a massive data centre in Laramie County, Wyoming to power AI tasks, amid political resistance to such large-scale projects.

The company is to build the project with partners Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power and Related Digital, with power partly coming from a planned 702-megawatt fuel-cell development, with fuel cells to be supplied by Bloom Energy, Google said.

The announcement came the same week that US citizens voted overwhelmingly in favour of controls on AI data centre build-outs.

Large-scale project

Of 41 ballot measures related to data centres that were voted on this week, all but one went against data centres, according to Ballotpedia.

Google said it would pay for all the power the data centre uses.

In June, Bloomberg reported that neocloud firm Crusoe, which was initially developing the Wyoming site, had been pressured to leave the project, after Google raised concerns about the costs and timetable under Crusoe’s oversight.

Crusoe initially announced the project in July 2025, working with Blackstone-backed infrastructure firm Tallgrass. Crusoe said at the time the facility could eventually scale to a huge 10GW of compute capacity.

The data centre was designed to take advantage of Tallgrass’ natural gas and water pipelines in the area.

Data centre scepticism

Large data centre developments have faced an increasing pushback from the public over their impact on local residents and their significant use of natural resources such as power and water.

Police in Finland recently opened a criminal probe into Google’s clear-cutting of forested land for a large-scale data centre, before it had completed the legally required environmental impact assessment.

The probe came weeks after Google announced it would invest €13bn to build data centres in Finland.