Google Bought Crusoe’s Wyoming Site. The Entitlements Came With It.

Google said on November 5, 2026, in a post signed by Steve Walter, its vice president for global infrastructure and energy, that it is building its first data center in Wyoming, in Laramie County, and called it “a long-term, $17 billion investment.” The post names Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power (AEP) and Related Digital as partners. It says the project is contracted with AEP for a 702 megawatt fuel cell development with carbon capture and storage, using natural gas fuel cells made by Bloom Energy, with captured carbon dioxide stored at Tallgrass’s Eastern Wyoming Sequestration Hub. Google says it is also sourcing power from gas generators run by Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy, that the data center will be air-cooled, that it will pay for all the power it uses, and that it expects “hundreds of millions of dollars in local property taxes for Laramie County and School District 1.” Those are Google’s statements, not PSV findings. The post gives no acreage, building area, IT capacity, start date or completion date, and it does not mention Crusoe.

Crusoe filled in the other half a day later. In a November 6 release from Denver, the company said its site in southeast Wyoming “has been acquired by Google” and that the transaction marks the completion of its pre-development work, which it lists as site selection, governmental approvals and power strategy. Chief executive Chase Lochmiller described that work as “origination, entitlement, and de-risking.” Neither company disclosed a price. A third record dates the handover earlier. In a memo to residents dated July 8, 2026, the Laramie County Board of Commissioners wrote that the project formerly called Project Jade is now Project Tembo, that Crusoe’s submittal had received a zone change to the Switchgrass Industrial Park planned unit development and a commercial site plan approval, that “Crusoe Energy has withdrawn from the project,” and that the county had since held discussions with Google, doing business as Jupiter Star Holdings, LLC, about a re-submittal. The county described a withdrawal in July; Crusoe describes a completed sale in November. The records do not say when the land itself closed.

What Crusoe sold was the approval record and the power plan on a piece of land, and the county memo shows how much of that record survived the change of owner. The commissioners wrote that because the updated application is significantly smaller than the approved site plan, the county intends to process the site plan revision administratively. The one public hearing the memo schedules, before the Planning Commission on August 13, 2026, is specific to a new office complex east of the industrial park, which needs a Class B conditional use permit (PZ-26-00057) alongside the overall site plan submittal (PZ-26-00058). PSV did not check the outcome of that hearing. The memo also says Tallgrass holds its own zone change and site plan approvals for a natural gas power hub and that construction phases there are well underway.

The table below sets the county’s figures for the approved plan against the re-submittal. The reduction computes to 945,500 square feet, or about 23.5 percent of the approved building area. Divide Google’s $17 billion by the 3,080,000 square feet in the re-submittal and it computes to roughly $5,500 per square foot of building, but treat that as a ceiling on what the figure could mean, not a construction cost: Google does not define what the $17 billion covers or over what period.

A land or development team on either side of a deal like this should build an approval inheritance schedule before it argues about price. Inputs: the zone change ordinance and planned unit development text, the approved site plan and its conditions, every re-submittal and staff memo, the hearing calendar, the power and offtake agreements with the name of the counterparty on each, and the water and wastewater approvals. Output: one row per approval that states who holds it, whether it runs with the land or with the applicant, what kind of change sends it back to a public hearing, and its status today, with each cell citing the page of the record it came from. An assistant can draft that table from the county’s public notice portal and the contract set and flag every cell where the record is silent.

The reviewer is the team’s land use counsel with the development lead, and the approval gate is that no letter of intent, price or closing date goes out until counsel has confirmed each row against the recorded documents. Power needs the same treatment, because here the public records name different parties. AEP’s quarterly report on Form 10-Q, filed October 28, says an unregulated AEP subsidiary agreed in January 2026 to buy solid oxide fuel cells for approximately $2.65 billion and signed a 20-year offtake arrangement with “a high investment grade third-party customer” for all of the output of a fuel cell facility expected to be located near Cheyenne. The filing does not name the customer or the megawatts. Google’s post names AEP and 702 megawatts. PSV reads the two as the same project, and labels that an inference, not a filed fact.