Wyoming is still the flagship for a water-efficient data center under development in Evanston, even though the company building it has recently inked a deal to build more of its innovative data centers along Interstate 35 in Texas.
Prometheus Hyperscale will be collaborating with independent power producer ENGIE, which, according to ENGIE’s website, has a combined generating capacity of 115.3 gigawatts with another 10.5 gigawatts on the way.
That makes the company the world’s largest independent power producer (IPP), according to Prometheus Hyperscale’s founder and sixth-generation Wyomingite, Trenton Thornock.
“To give you some idea on scale, the state of Wyoming on a peak day, uses about 1 gigawatt, including the data centers that are already there,” he said. “So ENGIE’s much larger than our IPP partner that we have in Wyoming, which is a U.S. company.”
Prometheus builds liquid-cooled data centers that rely on proprietary geothermal technology to enable zero water use, Thornock said, while ENGIE brings a powerhouse of renewables and battery storage.
“These are investments that ENGIE has already made, where they already own the land,” Thornock said. “And, in most cases, they have an operating facility that’s got a grid connection, which is really hard to otherwise come by (in Texas).”
The waiting list to connect to the power grid in Texas is about five years long in most places right now, Thornock said, but by teaming up with ENGIE, Prometheus can skip ahead and start building out their data centers as soon as they have a tenant lined up.
“There are a lot of tenants who are looking for power by the end of 2026,” Thornock said. “Our deal with ENGIE allows us to deliver on that. Kind of the soonest we can get power built in Wyoming is around 2027, and a lot the hyperscalers are not buying for 2027, 2028, or 2029, which is when all that capacity would come online.”
The deal, in many ways, speaks to the congestion that’s happening right now. Everyone wants more power right now, and they want it yesterday.
“The entire U.S. grid is becoming congested in part because we’re bringing manufacturing back to the United States,” Thornock said. “It was going overseas for the last 25 years. And, at the same time, you’ve got new data centers coming online for AI.”
That’s in addition to all the new cloud computing centers that are also still needed.
“Even though it doesn’t make it into the news headlines, cloud is still growing,” Thornock said. “And a lot of the co-location of data centers are still providing new capacity for companies that need more cloud capacity.”
The Texas deal doesn’t change Thornock’s goals in the Cowboy State.
“It’s very opportunistic,” Thornock said. “But we’re still focused on our flagship, which is in Uinta County, Wyoming.”
Evanston Nearing A Deal
Interest in the Evanston, Wyoming data center has been spiking, Thornock said, and he’s already had two prospective tenants ask for letters of intent.
“Wyoming is moving,” he said. “The key to Wyoming is how fast can we get natural gas laterals from the existing pipeline infrastructure in the area to the place where we’re going to create the power.”
Negotiations to bring tenants to data centers have been long and time-consuming, Thornock added.
“One of our counterparties, we’ve been negotiating with for an entire year now,” he said. “(But) we can’t start until we have a tenant contract in hand. That enables us to get financing to go build because nobody, nobody can build this stuff on spec. Like even the minimum build in Wyoming is about a $1.4 billion spend, so even large companies don’t build these on speculation.”
Thornock is headed to New York this week to meet with institutional investors about both his projects in Texas and Wyoming.
“ENGIE has given us access to a handful of sites — six to be precise — and we’re in the process of figuring out kind of the best ones, and then we’ll take those to market,” Thornock said. “Because the Texas data center market is so hot, we think we’ll get contracts fairly quickly and that those will get off and running.”
Which site will get built first is a toss-up right now, Thornock said.
“The Texas sites obviously already have power and a grid interconnection so they are ahead in that respect,” he said. “But we’re further along in the negotiations for Wyoming, because we haven’t even taken the Texas sites to market yet.”
Insatiable Demand
Thornock’s family has been ranching in the southwest Wyoming area for a collective 156 years now. That was the motivation for taking a different approach to the data center he plans to build in Wyoming, as well as, eventually, across the nation.
Given his background in ranching, the last thing Thornock and his family wanted or needed is a water hog in their backyard. So, in his mind, it was imperative that he build something that’s compatible with their ongoing agricultural interests.
“We’re a ranching family,” Thornock said. “We want to stay away from that. And we want reliable (power) generation, so the generation we’re going to build will be primarily natural gas.”
There’s a possibility that the new data center may include some wind and batteries in the future.
“That’s an option. We’re not banking on that,” Thornock said. “We’re banking on using Wyoming gas — clean stuff — and using that as what we call our base load power.”
In 2020, when Thornock was developing his ideas for a data center that would be liquid-cooled but not a water hog, investors told him he was crazy.
“They’re like, ‘Oh well, good luck with that,’” Thornock recalled. “‘Nobody needs that kind of infrastructure.’”
That struck a little fear in Thornock’s heart at first. He’s had a long and successful career in the financial sector and is all too familiar with the private equity joke that being early is the same as being wrong.
But the minute AI hit the horizon, the joke was on everyone else. Now everyone needs a better idea for cooling these hyper-intense, energy-guzzling computing centers where a chip the size of one’s thumb can generate as much heat as a microwave.
That’s put his water-efficient data center model on the leading edge of what he sees as “insatiable demand.”
“We’ve talked to tenants, we’ve talked to AI companies, we’ve talked to some of our competitors, and nobody can build fast enough right now,” he said. “There’s plenty of business out there for everyone.”
Reversing Brain Drain
One of Thornock’s biggest hopes for the data center he’s chosen to build in Wyoming, even though it might have been faster to build them elsewhere, is that it will create new opportunities for Wyoming graduates.
Thornock is well aware of Wyoming’s brain-drain crisis, where 60% of its graduates leave the state by age 30, many never to return.
“I’m in touch with a lot of people who grew up in the Evanston area,” he said. And in most cases, they had to leave. Like, there’s limited economic opportunity for them.”
Wyoming’s youth outmigration is among highest in the country, Wyoming Business Council Executive Director Josh Dorrell has told Cowboy State Daily in previous interviews, and it’s a contributing factor in the state’s steadily declining GDP, which has been on a downward trend since 2008.
“We’ve had some ups and downs, as we usually do but the overall trend is down,” Dorrell said. “And then our median wage, again, went down. So, the thing that we haven’t been able to do yet is really kind of focus on that knowledge sector and really go after those firms.”
Thornock hopes his facility will be part of the change he’d like to see in Wyoming, providing economic opportunities to those who might otherwise leave the state.
Economic analysis of the data center in Evanston, which was performed by University of Wyoming, shows a $3.1 billion economic impact for operation of the data center, looking out to 2032, for Thornock’s project in Uinta County.
Employment wise, the center would have 600 direct employees in 2032, according to the UW analysis. That would make it Uinta County’s largest employer, according to Uinta County Economic Developer Gary Welling.
Uinta has lately been drawing the interest of other data centers, Welling added.
“I don’t know why southwest Wyoming is starting to get hit with data centers, whether that’s because of Trenton or because of other things going around,” Welling said. “But I suspect they’re just looking for that redundancy in different areas, so that they don’t have any downtime, which is detrimental to the cloud.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
