A lot of companies come in with nebulous assurances that they’ll hire as many local people as possible, promises that often have less than transparent follow-through.
Prometheus Hyperscale in Evanston, Wyoming, is planning to do more than just hire local. It wants to train local, too.
It’s folding that effort into its Build Wyoming initiative, which will include community benefit agreements developed through discussions with local leaders at each of its data center locations.
Those agreements will also have transparency measures to keep the company accountable to the promises it’s making.
While those agreements are not yet in place, the company has already written a $10,000 check to that end — cash it hopes will help kickstart a vocational workforce pipeline at Eastern Wyoming College.
The program could one day crank out a workforce highly skilled in data center construction.
The check was just to “get things going,” Prometheus President Trevor Neilson told Cowboy State Daily.
“But we’re going to go a lot farther than that,” he added. “And we have also sent them a draft curriculum because there are some pretty great curriculums out there related to vocational training for data centers.
"So, we’re going to be working with them on that as well, and we’ll plan to do the same thing in Uinta County.”
Reversing Brain Drain
Build Wyoming was created around an idea of Prometheus Hyperscale’s founder Trenton Thornock that data center demand could help Wyoming solve its brain drain problem, where talented young people leave the state to further their careers.
“I’m in touch with a lot of people who grew up in the Evanston area and, in most cases, they had to leave,” he has told Cowboy State Daily in previous interviews. “Like, there’s limited economic opportunity for them.
"So, the reason I’m doing this on a personal level is to create opportunities for students and college graduates to stay in Wyoming.”
Brain drain has been a longstanding issue for the Cowboy State, Wyoming Business Council’s Josh Dorrell has also told Cowboy State Daily in previous interviews.
The state loses the majority of its college and high school graduates by the time they’ve hit their 30s.
“We lose 65% of those people,” he said. “There’s only one other state that has a greater exodus, and I think it might be West Virginia.”
Data centers are a huge opportunity for Wyoming to create a raft of high-paying jobs that will help keep Wyoming students closer to home, Neilson believes, with data centers poised to create “tens of thousands of jobs.”
Prometheus by itself plans two campuses, one in Uinta County near Evanston and another in Converse County near Casper. From the two, Prometheus is projecting an overall employment of 5,000 people.
“The over 5,000 number is long-term direct and indirect positions,” Neilson said. “It’s what they call beneficial employment, because once we have built the data center, a number of other things will need to be built, like hotels, more restaurants, more banks.
“So, there’s an exponential impact, if you will, in job creation.”
The Trump administration has also highlighted artificial intelligence centers as crucial to national security, which has only added to the demand frenzy when it comes to building data centers.
“I don’t always agree with everything the president says, but I agree with this,” Neilson said. “Because if the Chinese win the AI war, that’s a really scary thing.”
Building data centers will require a lot of specialties, though, Neilson said.
That's why a training center is crucial for Wyoming, to facilitate hiring a local workforce and make all those promises to hire local more than empty words.
“It’s not enough to just say to an electrician or to a pipefitter or a plumber or something, ‘Hey, you should work in a data center,’” Neilson said. “You actually need to empower people to do so.”
Goals That Align
Eastern Wyoming College has been working on a new vocational wing for a while now.
The original concept was to focus on building tiny houses that would be affordable for workforce, according to Converse County Commissioner Jim Willox, who is the county’s liaison with the college’s Douglas campus,
“Over the last two and a half years, the world’s changed a little bit,” he said. “And we still need housing, but there’s been the technology thing around data centers and then their associated power plants — whether they be wind, solar, natural gas — and then the oil and gas industry. So, all of those things are kind of there.”
What Prometheus wants to do with Build Wyoming matches up well with many of EWC’s own goals, Willox added.
“There’s no formal alignment yet,” he said. “They’re just very much shooting for the same things. And if we find a partnership in the future that makes sense, I think both sides would be excited.”
Housing is still a need, Willox added, and be a focus of the vocational programs being developed at EWC’s Douglas campus.
“But as industry develops in our area, we want to be receptive to the skills that are needed,” Willox said. "I think data centers like Prometheus and others who are conversing with us raise the question, what other things can we offer that will be helpful for the workforce and help build the economy in Converse County and Wyoming?”
Evolving programs to suit community needs already has some history at the Eastern Wyoming College’s Douglas Campus.
It started 10-12 years ago with two primary classes: nursing and welding.
“We continue to offer nursing, but now we offer a gunsmithing class,” he said. “The welding one shifted over to the gunsmithing, machining.”
Its current expansion is funded with a $2 million federal grant for coal-impacted communities aiming to help retrain displaced workers.
While Douglas doesn’t have coal miners anymore, it does have railroad workers and others who are affected by coal declines, which is what made them eligible for the grant.
Get Ready For Natural Gas To Go Boom
The data centers Prometheus plans, meanwhile, will not be water hungry, nor will they try to crowd onto the public utility grid, Prometheus Founder and CEO Trenton Thornock has told Cowboy State Daily.
Prometheus has designed a water frugal model that will take non-potable water from far below the drinking water table for cooling, then send that water back down to where it came from.
“We don’t care if the water is alkaline or salty,” Thornock said. “We can change our heat exchanger design to a titanium plate so that the salt doesn’t eat it.
"Other than that, it’s all the same to us. Bad water to everyone else is still good water to us.”
Prometheus also doesn’t plan to crowd onto the public utility grid for its power. Instead, it will build its own power generation using natural gas.
That’s yet another way that data centers can help secure Wyoming’s future, Neilson believes, by creating demand for its legacy oil and gas industry.
Mineral extraction is still Wyoming’s No. 1 industry, but it took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wyoming’s industry has still not fully recovered from the demand destruction the pandemic caused, but its potential is looking up recently thanks to data centers.
Not only has Prometheus announced plans to build its own power generation, but so has the absolutely massive Project Jade being built in Cheyenne by Crusoe and Tallgrass.
Project Jade is already slated to start with 2.7 gigawatts — almost triple what the entire state of Wyoming needs for power. However, it could ultimately scale to 10 gigawatts, 10 times the state’s current power demand.
Prometheus, meanwhile, is targeting 1 gigawatt for Evanston data center and 1.5 gigawatts for its Casper data center, which will also help create a healthy amount of natural gas demand.
“Our two locations, each individually, will use more Wyoming gas than any facility in the history of Wyoming,” Neilson said. “So instead of sending our gas somewhere else, where it creates jobs there, why not use it right here in Wyoming?”
Wyoming Is HQ, But Other States Also In Play
Prometheus Hyperscale has set its headquarters in Evanston, but it isn’t just planning to build data centers in Wyoming.
It’s already working to build out additional data centers in Texas, and it lists future plans for Colorado and Arizona at its website.
But Wyoming has the best potential of them all, Neilson believes. It has the right climate in terms of cooler weather and business friendly policies, and it has abundant energy resources.
“Wyoming already produces 13 times more energy than it consumes,” Neilson said. “So, the potential for this industry in Wyoming is, I think, greater than just about any other state.”
Texas, meanwhile, which has been a good place to build data centers, is starting to get overcrowded.
“They’re having all sorts of problems as a result,” Neilson said. “And we don’t have any problems in Wyoming.”
It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Wyoming, Neilson believes, one that could not only help Wyoming bolster its legacy oil and gas industry but create long-term jobs that will help it retain more of its sons and daughters closer to home.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
