President Donald Trump has talked a lot about bringing huge data centers to the United States from Saudi Arabia.
About the same time that Trump was discussing that, an Evanston, Wyoming man was standing on a stage in Abu Dhabi talking about what a great place Wyoming is for data and artificial intelligence centers.
Trenton Thornock is the CEO of Prometheus Hyperscale. His flagship project that’s under development will be a 1-gigawatt data center campus in Evanston that he told Cowboy State Daily will be one of the largest in the world when complete.
By comparison, the large Microsoft data center in Cheynne is a little more than 235 megawatts.
“There’s a whole ecosystem of investment funds and other people we had meetings with, most of which I cannot relate to you, because we have all the secrecy around these funds and who our tenants might be,” Thornock said. “But we are in pretty deep discussions right now with several big tech companies.”
Some of those companies are already in Wyoming, Thornock added.
“We’ve also been talking to major artificial intelligence companies,” Thornock said. “I can’t say which ones, but people can guess who they are.
“But the whole idea is that we want to bring that business to southwest Wyoming. Because right now, there’s a little bit of it in Cheyenne, but there’s really nothing on the western side of the state.”
Who’s Behind Prometheus Hyperscale
Thornock said he’s brought some heavy hitters to his company, including Bernard Looney, former CEO of BP, one of the world’s largest energy companies.
During his tenure there, Looney led efforts to transform BP from an international oil company to an integrated energy company.
“He’s one of the brightest power minds in the country,” Thornock said. “And he’s going to help us select the right partner and get the contracts done right so we can build up to a gigawatt, which is 1,000 megawatts, of additional capacity on my family’s land.”
Thornock’s land also includes access to the Silver Eagle refinery, built in the 1980s, which is another potential source of power, and part of an industry that Thornock said he still wants to be a part of supporting.
In his bio on the Prometheus website, Looney says he joined the company because of an increasing interest on the intersection of energy, AI and sustainability.
The president of the company, meanwhile, is Trevor Neilson, cofounder, chairman and CEO of WasteFuel, a bioenergy company backed by BP, Maersk and NetJets.
Prior to that, Neilson cofounded the investment firm NetZero with Howard Warren Buffett, a company that focused on the energy transition. Neilson worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation early in his career as the director of communications and special projects. He’s also the author of “Sustainable Intelligence,” a book about how artificial intelligence can help solve global challenges.
Thornock himself isn’t small potatoes.
Among the job experiences he lists is serving as chief financial officer for the Miller Group, a Trinity Hunt Partners portfolio company, and for WellDog, a high-growth energy technology company that was backed by Shell Ventures.
Before that he served as senior vice president and chief financial officer for Scientific Drilling International, which is the world’s largest private horizontal and directional drilling company.
Thornock also owns Hyperfuels, an e-commerce racing fuels retailer and U.S. distributor of TOTAL racing lubricants.
Project Started Before AI Took Off
Thornock’s family has been ranching in the southwest Wyoming area for a collective 156 years now, and he said he’s been working on his company for more than four years.
“We’ve been around for a while now, and we’re not going anywhere,” he said. “This is a long-term obligation on my part. And I’ve invested several million of my own money to do the design and engineering. We started before AI was even a thing.”
Back in 2020, Thornock said there were some small AI deployments, and there was some machine learning and high-performance computing.
“We were really ahead of the curve for the time, but we did it for sustainability purposes, to avoid using water,” he said. “So, what we accidentally did was, we architectured and engineered for these high-density artificial intelligence deployments.”
That makes the center he’s designing “fit for purpose” when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, because it has more energy density.
“There are a lot of data centers out there, and they’re good for cloud type stuff,” he said. “But they’re not built for AI. Ours is specifically designed for AI.”
When Being Early Isn’t Wrong
The campus Thornock is designing is huge.
It’s a quarter of a mile from one end of the building to another, and it will be jam-packed with energy.
A regular data center’s power density is between 5 to 15 kilowatts for what’s called a server rack. To put that on an understandable scale, a microwave is around 1.2 to 1.4 Kilowatts.
“So, it’s like having five microwave ovens in a stack,” Thornock said. “These new AI chips — the newest ones that haven’t even hit the market yet — are 1,000 watts per chip. And you can have hundreds of those in a rack.”
Those chips generate a lot of heat, Thornock added, and moving all that heat out is critical, because otherwise the entire thing will get too hot and burn out.
“That can’t happen, because each one of these servers is like hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece,” Thornock said. “So, you don’t want them to burn up.”
To solve that, Thornock’s system will use liquid instead of air for cooling, something initially done with sustainability in mind.
But it turns out to be perfect for AI.
“There’s like this massive mind shift that’s going on in the digital infrastructure space,” Thornock said. “People have been building data centers a certain way for decades. And now, all of a sudden, the chip technology has changed, and they all have to go liquid.”
When Thornock started, AI was barely a glimmer on the horizon. As an investor, he’s very familiar with the private equity joke that says being early is the same as being wrong.
“People thought this was crazy,” Thornock said. “Because I said I’m going to build a 120-megawatt facility in Wyoming, and it’s going to be all liquid cool. And they’re like, ‘Oh well, good luck with that. Nobody needs that kind of infrastructure. Now everybody needs it.’”
Lining Up The Power Grid
There’s one other way that Thornock’s early start has worked in his favor, and that’s all about power.
Data centers are known as hungry creatures, but artificial intelligence centers are even hungrier. A ChatGPT query takes 10 times the energy of a typical Google search.
“It takes a lot of money to build one of these things, and that’s part of why it’s so difficult to get people to go to an emerging market,” Thornock said. “They want to build next to another data center that already exists, and there aren’t any in southwest Wyoming.”
But Thornock’s early start has created another unlikely advantage for his idea. That’s access to power in a market sector that’s starving for it.
“Salt Lake City was one of the fastest growing emerging market, but it’s run out of power and they won’t have any sizable chunks of new power on the grid until 2030,” Thornock said. “So, unless it’s a retrofit, Salt Lake City isn’t going to get the benefit of the AI shift, because they don’t have any power.
“I started early enough that I was ahead of the craze with my requests to the utility.”
Thornock also signed a non-binding letter of intent with Sam Altman’s Oslo, a fast fission clean power technology and nuclear fuel recycling company, for 100 megawatts of power and is working with Stanley Morgan to find independent power sources to add to his development.
“These are the guys who build wind farms and solar arrays,” Thornock said. “They do combined cycle natural gas generation facilities, so we’re trying to modify our contract with Rocky Mountain Power so that we can actually have an interconnect with them to put some of our power on the grid.”
That will drive down the cost of the data/AI center Thornock wants to build, giving it a better return on investment.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
