Eight miles south of Cheyenne, Wyoming, on land that until recently served as seasonal cattle grazing, something extraordinary is taking shape.
The steel frames going up at the Switchgrass Industrial Park belong to what will be the largest data center campus in Wyoming’s history.
For months, nobody outside a handful of county officials knew who was building it.
The project had a codename, a shell company, and a power contract so large it made local engineers pause.
The real owner stayed hidden in plain sight.
A project so big that Cheyenne’s own planners had questions
Planning documents filed in Laramie County referred only to “Project Jade”, later rebranded “Project Tembo”, a campus in the Switchgrass Industrial Park, eight miles south of Cheyenne, on land that until recently served as seasonal cattle grazing.
The project spans 716 acres at Switchgrass Industrial Park south of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The campus will be developed on the 716-acre parcel, with four data halls to be built, along with an office hub, logistics, and network buildings.
No company name. No press release. Just permits, earthworks, and a power demand that staggered local utility planners.
The power numbers that made the whole state look small
At 2.7 gigawatts, the campus would draw nearly three times the electricity the entire state of Wyoming currently consumes.
That is not a typo.
Planning filings suggest the site could ultimately scale toward 10 gigawatts, a ceiling number, not a built figure, and still moving through the permitting process.
To feed that appetite, Tallgrass Energy was noted as still building out and delivering a bring-your-own power generation hub for the data center client, continuing “full steam ahead.”
The power infrastructure alone is projected to exceed $7 billion in investment.
Whoever was behind this was not thinking small.
A developer swap that nobody announced publicly
The project had originally been linked to Crusoe Energy, an AI infrastructure company that secured early county approvals.
At the time, it was described as a 1.8 GW campus that could scale to 10 GW.
In June, Crusoe said it had paused work on the site “at the request of our customer.”
Bloomberg subsequently reported that Google had raised concerns about costs and the construction timetable under Crusoe’s management, ultimately ending its role on the project.
Ownership eventually surfaced through a June 30 county filing, not a company announcement.
The name in that filing changed everything.
The reveal: it is Google, operating through a subsidiary
The 2.7-gigawatt data center once called Project Jade, eight miles south of Cheyenne, has been unmasked as a massive Google campus.
Project Jade is now Project Tembo, and the company behind the 2.7-gigawatt facility is a mystery no longer.
The data center will be owned and operated by Google, giving Cheyenne yet another of the world’s largest tech companies in what is fast becoming an emerging tech frontier.
According to local reporting by Cowboy State Daily, Project Tembo is now being developed by Google’s wholly owned subsidiary Jupiter Star Holdings, LLC, replacing Crusoe.
Google has already provided over $200 million in refundable contributions toward construction, with Black Hills Energy tracking service for early 2028.
The campus joins a wave of silicon and steel now reshaping the Wyoming plains.
Cheyenne has hosted Microsoft data centers since 2012, and that company has announced plans for a major expansion across a 3,200-acre tract.
Meta announced an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot campus on a 960-acre parcel in the High Plains Business Park.
The hardware that will run inside campuses like this one is itself a record-setter: NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin chips are already shipping to cloud providers as the AI factory buildout accelerates, and newer server chips like the AMD EPYC Venice, with its 256 cores on TSMC 2nm silicon, are the processors hyperscalers are queueing up for exactly these facilities.
What a Wyoming cattle field now means for America’s data future
Construction at Project Tembo is slated to be completed by 2031.
Cheyenne now hosts 10 existing data centers, five under construction, and nine in advanced discussions, making this once-quiet state capital one of the fastest-moving data center markets in the country.
Some local observers, including a longtime Cheyenne attorney and city councilman, have begun questioning whether data center and power planning are keeping pace with the speed and scale of these projects.
That debate is likely to grow as Tembo and other campuses continue to converge on Cheyenne’s new tech frontier.
That tension is real, and it is worth watching. But the core fact stands: a county permit, not a press release, just handed Wyoming its place at the center of the global AI infrastructure map.
Project Tembo is not a concept. The cranes are already on-site.