Stocky black cows graze amid yellow flowers in southwest Wyoming. The rolling foothills could soon be home to a massive new AI data center from the company Prometheus Hyperscale.
I spent most of my summers in Wyoming riding north of the interstate here, moving cattle
That’s Prometheus founder Trenton Thornock. His family has ranched this land for six generations.
He left for a career in finance, but now he has a new way to make money here - building data centers in the wild west. And he’s also finding ways to power them.
so right here, we're measuring the amount of sunlight that we get during the day
He points to a weather station. It’s finding the best angle for solar panels……for potential big tech customers - like Google and Meta.
If if you look this way along the ridgeline, you’ll see another big row of wind turbines. We sit right in the middle of all of this renewable energy infrastructure.
“Sustainable infrastructure for the age of AI” is Prometheus' tagline. But sustainability isn’t simple at the company’s flagship center - it will produce all its own power, recycle its water, use efficient cooling systems and even use heat from whirring servers to grow microgreens and farm shrimp.
And Thornock says all that - still won’t be enough.
You’ve got gas pipelines on both sides for natural gas generation.
The bulk of its energy – at least for now – is slated to come from fossil fuels - natural gas, which is abundant in Wyoming.
In the long-run Thornock wants to transition to small modular reactors…mini nuclear plants - but the tech is still a ways off.
So why not turn to wind and solar to fill the gap? Prometheus says it’s expensive.
You know, a thousand megawatt wind farm does not provide the same capacity as a thousand megawatt coal plant or a natural gas plant,
Mary Throne is a lawyer for Prometheus, and former lawmaker. She questions the reliability of renewable energy for data centers - some need as much power as a small city.
We really need to be more forward thinking and more open to taking advantage of all sources of energy. Technology is our friend
Technology like carbon capture. That’s how Prometheus plans to achieve net zero. Since it plans to use natural gas, it’ll offset the impact by paying another company to transport liquid CO2 from ethanol plants in the Midwest to Wyoming…then inject it into the ground about 60 miles from the data center.
But Amory Lovins says this isn’t very high quality sustainability. The Stanford professor is the founder of the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute.
It sounds like a pretty sketchy model.
He sits in what looks like a jungle –a solar banana farm in his Aspen, Colorado, living room. Lovins says carbon capture data isn’t always trustworthy - though Prometheus says its credits will be third-party certified.
It's a lot more straightforward to make your own clean power on site.
But Thornock says Prometheus will still build the first net-zero data center.
He gets in his car. He says he sees himself as a steward of the sagebrush-covered land.
We've been here for generations.
The name Prometheus comes from Greek mythology and means foresight.
We hope to be here for many more generations and my nephews and nieces will someday inherit the ranch.
…Although they may find themselves to be data wranglers, rather than cowboys, in the decades to come.