Prometheus Hyperscale Evanston Campus data center, Evanston, Wyoming

Prometheus Hyperscale wants a data center campus on 506 acres of ranchland 12 miles east of Evanston, in Uinta County, Wyoming, on the south side of Interstate 80. The ground is a ranch Trenton Thornock's family has worked for six generations, and the campus he wants on it would draw 1.25 gigawatts, more electricity than all the homes in Wyoming use. Thornock founded the company as Wyoming Hyperscale White Box, the name this project still carries, and renamed it Prometheus Hyperscale in September 2024 when he announced four more sites in Arizona and Colorado. The company puts the initial 1.25 gigawatts on a development path to 5 gigawatts.

On May 26, 2026, Thornock took the plan to a packed room at the Roundhouse in Evanston. He argued the industry is wasteful and his design is not, saying of other operators that "they're using way too much power for the amount of compute that they're getting out and they're using way too much water for cooling." Asked about the grid, he said the campus would run off grid on natural gas from the Kern River pipeline, burned in engines on site, so there is "zero impact on your rates, because we are not connecting to Rocky Mountain Power." The company describes a fully islanded microgrid of high efficiency natural gas engines and turbines with no draw on the public utility grid. Cooling would be a closed loop of water and propylene glycol, trucked in and replaced about every six years, which the company says means no draw on groundwater or surface water. For the engines themselves Thornock put the water use at "a couple of Yeti cups per day" each, with a well on site only for employee washrooms. Eric Schlidt of the Build Wyoming initiative said the campus would not use water from the nearby Bear River. County Commissioner Mark Anderson asked whether the 200 permanent jobs would be real local jobs or remote ones, and was told they would not be remote, at wages from about $75,000 a year on the low end to about $150,000 on the high end. Pressed on who the tenants would be, Thornock said he had turned down a contract with the Chinese owned company ByteDance, and that the final agreement bars certain owners, with at least five Chinese names on the list. He said repeatedly that he had asked for no tax abatements and was taking no government money, and that the equity and debt behind the campus were raised from private investors through a Morgan Stanley bond offering.

The University of Wyoming Center for Business and Economic Analysis put the figures at a $3.1 billion economic impact through 2032, $184 million in state tax revenue during construction and $53 million a year once the campus runs. Cowboy State Daily read the same analysis differently, as $3.1 billion in Uinta County through 2032 and $184 million statewide through 2029, with the $53 million a year coming largely from severance taxes on the gas burned on site.

Uinta County commissioners granted the conditional use permit unanimously on June 17, 2026. Three residents, Christy Katzl, Wilhelm Katzl and Marijke Rossi, filed a petition for administrative review on July 16, 2026. They said meetings with the developers had gone unadvertised, that possible family connections between county officials and the developers had not been disclosed, which county officials denied, and that no environmental study of the closed loop water system was done before the permits were issued. Judge James Kaste ruled against them on August 17, 2026, finding they had not answered a motion to dismiss in time and had not shown how the data center would harm them personally. That ended the review and left the permits standing. Christy Katzl, stepping back because of cancer surgery, said: "I stand firmly behind the concerns we raised regarding the Prometheus Hyperscale data center, but it is now up to the citizens of Uinta County to take up the banner and drive this forward."

Cowboy State Daily reported on August 25, 2026 that ground had not been broken and that a county commission meeting that week was one of the last steps before construction could start. The company expects to begin within six months of final permitting and to build the full 1.25 gigawatts in phases over 48 to 60 months. The plan has changed shape over the years. When Data Center Frontier wrote about Wyoming Hyperscale in November 2022 it was a build on 120 megawatts contracted from Rocky Mountain Power with a 138 kilovolt substation, cooled by dunking servers in fluid, with waste heat warming a 30 acre indoor farm. The power figure is now ten times that and the utility connection is gone.