Google will spend $17 billion to build its first Wyoming data center, a campus near Cheyenne that it plans to power in part with a 702-megawatt bank of natural-gas fuel cells fitted with carbon capture and storage. The company announced the project, previously known as Project Jade and now called Project Tembo, alongside partners Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power and Related Digital. AEP will build and own the fuel cells, supplied by Bloom Energy, and expects full operation by the end of 2028; the captured carbon dioxide will be piped to an underground storage site run by Tallgrass.
Google says the capture technology will store "a large majority" of the fuel cells' carbon emissions and will lift its total contracted carbon-capture capacity to nearly 1 gigawatt. It has not disclosed the facility's total power demand, a project-level emissions estimate, or the expected capture rate. Those omissions matter, because the climate benefit depends entirely on them. The International Energy Agency says established power-sector capture systems generally target 85 to 90 percent, leaving residual emissions even when they work as designed, and carbon capture itself consumes some of the electricity a plant produces.
The fuel cells are only one part of the power supply. Black Hills Energy plans to invest $1.8 billion between 2027 and 2029 to build 564 megawatts of new natural-gas generation for the site and will manage around 2.1 gigawatts of contracted resources through a private microgrid, with the data center drawing power from late 2027 and peaking around 2030. Google is also studying whether Tallgrass's combined-cycle gas turbines can later be retrofitted with capture. To limit water use, the company says the campus will rely on air cooling rather than evaporative systems.
The announcement captures the central tension of the AI buildout: demand for electricity is rising faster than the industry can decarbonize it. The IEA reported that global data-center electricity use rose 17 percent in 2025 and projects total consumption will nearly double from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to about 950 terawatt-hours by 2030, with AI-focused centers tripling their draw. It expects renewables to meet nearly half of that growth, but natural gas and coal together to supply more than 40 percent. Google's own 2026 environmental report shows the strain: the company contracted more than 12 gigawatts of clean energy last year even as its emissions have risen with its data-center expansion.
Wyoming's bet on capturing emissions sits against a starker picture elsewhere. Friends of the Earth Scotland warned this week that 23 proposed data centers there could emit 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gas a year by 2030, consuming 51 percent of the country's remaining carbon budget and making the sector Scotland's biggest polluter. Rivals are securing fossil power outright: Anthropic struck a roughly $3.4 billion deal in late September for 1.7 gigawatts of gas-fired generators. A different path exists but is barely used in the United States, which recovers little of the heat its roughly 4,000 data centers produce. In Denmark, a Sonderborg supercomputer channels 100 percent of its waste heat into a district network that warms 75,000 residents. Whether carbon capture can square Google's growth with its climate goals will not be clear until Project Tembo is running and the company says how much carbon it actually stores.