Google to build Wyoming facility

Alphabet Inc’s Google on Thursday said it would spend US$17 billion to build a data center in Wyoming, formally putting a price tag on the proposal two days after voters across the US delivered a broad rebuke to the development of such massive projects for artificial intelligence (AI) work.

Voters in Tuesday’s US midterm elections sided with limits on data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures, according to Ballotpedia.

In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa won the governor’s race after promising a data center moratorium.

The Google logo is pictured outside company offices in London on June 24 last year.

Photo: Reuters

Successful Democratic candidates for governor in Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania also campaigned on stricter regulations of the projects.

Google said in a blog post that the facility in Laramie County, Wyoming, would be its first in the state.

The company said it would pay for all the power the data center uses.

Last month, American Electric Power Co said it planned to invest US$4 billion in the project, which is to draw electricity in part from a 702 megawatt natural gas fuel cell development built with Bloom Energy Corp fuel cells.

The project would be air-cooled to limit water use, it added.

The deal reflects growing interest from technology companies in Bloom’s fuel cells as they look to provide power for energy-hungry AI systems.

Natural gas turbines are back-ordered for years, and nuclear projects can take a decade or more to permit and build.

Bloom said its fuel cells can be installed in as little as 90 days.

Google also said it expects to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes and will form a community council with its partners to address growth concerns in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Meanwhile, about 40 percent of pending data center capacity in the US is planned to be built in states where newly elected governors have promised to stop or pause such construction, according to data from Cleanview, a market intelligence company.

That is on top of 46 local ballot measures approved or on track to pass that also stall development, according to Bloomberg Economics.

At least 17 of those are outright bans on large-scale data centers.

Hyperscalers, the largest cloud-computing providers, are expected to overhaul and shift development plans in response.

Tuesday’s election results stand to shrink the US$1.4 trillion that technology companies were expected to spend on AI infrastructure by roughly 5 to 7 percent next year, Bloomberg Intelligence technology analyst Mandeep Singh said.

That includes spending on chips, networking equipment, land and other materials for data center construction, Singh said.

The cuts and the anticipated slowdown in approvals might translate into as many as 10 gigawatts of data center capacity failing to come online next year as planned, he said.

“We’ve gone from the question of who is going to pass a moratorium to where can I even construct one of these things now?” Bloomberg Intelligence policy analyst Justin Teresi said.

GLJ Research LLC founder Gordon Johnson said in a note on Tuesday that Texas data center projects that do not already have electricity and environmental permits lined up would “probably go to Louisiana, Oklahoma or nowhere.”