In Greek mythology, the god Prometheus is credited with stealing fire from Zeus, hiding it in a giant fennel stalk, and delivering it to humanity, in the process gifting the world science and technology.

Prometheus Hyperscale, the data center company formerly known as Wyoming Hyperscale Whitebox, has taken the Titan’s name and intends to deliver society a different kind of gift: a lot of sustainably-powered AI data halls.

With ambitious plans to develop its flagship campus in Evanston, Wyoming, and roll out its model to other parts of the US, Prometheus has been thinking big since recruiting cleantech entrepreneur Trevor Neilson as president.

Last November the company raised eyebrows when former BP CEO Bernard Looney joined as chairman. Looney left the oil and gas giant under a cloud in 2023 (he initially resigned, and was later sacked for serious misconduct after failing to disclose relationships with colleagues), but his arrival at Prometheus Hyperscale is likely to give the company additional credibility in some circles.

After several years developing its offering, Prometheus says it is finally ready to deliver.

Down on the ranch

The Prometheus Hyperscale story dates back to a time when AI had barely progressed beyond the pages of a Mary Shelley novel (the full title of which, incidentally, is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus).

In 1869, Trenton Thornock’s family headed West and set up a homestead on land at Aspen Mountain, southeast of Evanston in Wyoming’s Uinta County. Since then, the site has grown in size and passed through six generations of the family, becoming a well-established cattle ranch.

“My family have been custodians of this land for 155 years,” Thornock, Prometheus’s founder and CEO, tells DCD. “The actual parcel of land we’re building on was bought by my dad at auction in 1990, so in that sense it’s our ‘new’ acquisition because we’ve only had it for 34 years.”

Prior to founding Prometheus, Thornock spent his career in the energy industry, working in the Far East to deliver a zinc recycling facility outside Shanghai, China, and running a similar project in the Philippines.

“When I started out, I didn’t know much about data centers, but I have developed stuff before and worked on big industrial projects,” Thornock says. “For this site, we knew we couldn’t just build a data center in isolation, some big noisy box sucking in water and power.

“This is going to be in my backyard. My family has a responsibility to think about what the best use for this land is - a lot of it is virgin farmland that has never been developed before - and we want the data center to be a community asset, an anchor at the center of an ecosystem that adds value for Evanston.”

Thornock started Wyoming Hyperscale Whitebox in 2020, with a vision for a 120MW fully liquid-cooled campus using zero water, with power supplied by local wind farms and waste heat being used to warm an indoor farm and grow fresh produce which, it is hoped, will help reduce the reliance on food brought in from elsewhere.

“One of the first things we said from the start was that we would be 100 percent liquid-cooled,” he says. “I remember about three years ago someone from one of the hyperscalers telling me that liquid cooling was a niche that would never go mainstream, and that I was wasting my family’s money.”

Then AI happened.

“Fortunately for us, because we made that early decision around liquid cooling and having a way to reuse the waste heat created by compute, we were already focused on AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing as applications,” Thornock says.

Back in 2021, Thornock agreed a deal with Submer to use its immersion cooling pods on the site, but he says direct-to-chip liquid cooling will also be supported in Wyoming.

He says: “We’re not going to dictate to our tenants which kind of deployments they make. Our CDU is designed to be multi-liquid and designed to handle the kind of power surges you get within AI clusters.”

Going fishing

As the AI revolution was taking hold, Neilson was enjoying a serendipitous fly-fishing trip to Wyoming.

The self-described climate activist has enjoyed a varied career with a heavy emphasis on philanthropy, working in the family office of Bill and Melinda Gates, and later serving as the founding director of public affairs for the couple’s foundation. He then launched a consultancy, Global Philanthropy Group, to advise high-net-worth individuals on their philanthropic strategies, teaming with A-List stars including Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, and Shakira on charitable campaigns, a role that led the New York Times to dub him “Charity fixer to the stars.”

More recently Neilson worked with Howard Warren Buffett, grandson of Warren Buffett, to run i(x) Net Zero, an investment company focused on sustainability, and founded WasteFuel, a company transforming agricultural waste into low-carbon fuel. He has funded over 100 climate action groups through another project he set up, including Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, but decided to withdraw his backing for both in 2023, having become disillusioned that their tactics are mere “performative” stunts that “don’t accomplish anything.”

So how did a man with a contacts book that would be the envy of many a Hollywood agent end up in the data center industry? It’s back to that fishing trip, which Neilson embarked upon after deciding to leave his CEO role at WasteFuel.

“Any self-aware entrepreneur eventually realizes they need to replace themselves,” he says. “I started that process with WasteFuel and then began to think about what I would do next. This led me to do a lot of fly fishing, and I spent a lot of time in Wyoming.”

Neilson wanted a new challenge that involved tackling “the biggest consumers of electricity and other natural resources.” Naturally, this included data centers, and he says he became “fascinated by the excess energy produced in the State of Wyoming, and the policy environment there which is very enabling for renewables.”

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Wind energy is plentiful in Wyoming – James Michael House/Getty Images

Wyoming, which has the second smallest population of all the US states, produces 12 times more energy than it uses and is the third largest net supplier to other states, according to US Energy Information Administration figures. Much of this energy comes from fossil fuel-burning power stations, but efforts are being made to change this. Work has started on a 345MW sodium-cooled nuclear plant, which is being developed by TerraPower on the site of a retiring coal power plant. Wyoming also has a growing wind power sector, which accounts for 90 percent of the renewable energy used in the Cowboy State.

After investigating several projects, Neilson put in a call to Thornock. “I had done enough research on Trenton to know that he had a whole bunch of land in a part of the state that I happen to just really love,” he says. “I knew he was doing something very smart in southwestern Wyoming and I ended up wanting to be a part of it.

This led to what Neilson describes as “a strategy process” that involved “three or four months of figuring out how to build upon the exciting work that Trenton and his team had already done,” and evolve it into “a multi-project pipeline under the auspices of this new entity.”

Scaling up

And so Prometheus Hyperscale was born. The company intends to stay true to Thornock’s original vision, but is thinking about things on a larger scale.

That starts in Wyoming. Whereas back in 2020, a 120MW campus would have seemed enormous, now it is dwarfed by some of the data centers being pitched by the hyperscalers and their partners. The Evanston site is now targeting an eventual capacity of 1GW, and Thornock says the company is hopeful of having the first 120MW online in the next 18 months ready for hyperscale tenants.

Most of the power for the campus will be supplied directly by four wind farms located in the vicinity of Evanston, and the company claims less than 10 percent of its energy needs will be served by the state grid. Thornock says this percentage will eventually be reduced to zero, with Prometheus having signed a deal with small nuclear reactor company Oklo, which has agreed to deliver the data center 100MW of clean power.

“We’re not going to mess around with PPAs and paper ‘swaps,’” Thornock says, referring to the renewable energy offset deals often signed by data center operators. “We’re in an area where there are underutilized wind assets and they will effectively be our power grid. The utility will be happy because we’re increasing utilization.”

Prometheus also intends to install solar panels on the site, combining them with grid-scale batteries to ensure they have adequate power available when the wind is not blowing.

Further afield, the company has announced a pipeline of five other projects at locations in Pueblo and Fort Morgan, Colorado, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. These data centers will be attached to existing renewable energy assets such as microgrids, Thornock says, and run on the same carbon-neutral basis as the Evanston site.

“The reason we have projects in Arizona is because we had a solar microgrid company come to us and say ‘we’re looking for a developer that knows about liquid cooling and heat reuse,’” he says. “These deals are structured as joint ventures with the microgrid operator, so we don’t need to worry about land acquisition and things like. We just need guaranteed power and long-haul fiber, then we can bring out the data center ecosystem.”

Thornock says this approach has led to a number of interesting opportunities, many of which have yet to be made public.

“We’ve had a whole series of these distributed generation developers approaching us to say ‘we like what you’re doing in Wyoming and we would like you to offtake our renewable power,’” he says. “It’s mostly solar, with some wind, some connected to the grid and some not. We’ve announced the five sites but we have more than a dozen in the pipeline, some up to 1GW.”

Looney’s arrival, announced after DCD interviewed Neilson and Thornock, is likely to open more doors for Prometheus Hyperscale. For the moment, the company is focused on getting its first site up and running.

Neilson says the project will maintain the spirit of the original homesteaders who settled on the land in the 19th century. “The families that came West had to work in harmony with the land, or they would die,” he says. “It was a very dangerous undertaking, and that pioneer spirit and cooperation with nature is very apt for those of us thinking about the future of AI and how we build infrastructure to support it. If we do not work in harmony with nature, we will not survive, and that’s at the core of who we are.”

The tale of the original Prometheus concludes with the god tied to a rock and having his liver repeatedly pecked out by an eagle as part of punishment from Zeus. All involved will be hoping the story of Prometheus Hyperscale has a much happier ending.