Former BP CEO Bernard Looney has joined Prometheus Hyperscale as chairman.
Looney, who left his role at the oil and gas company last September, has linked up with the data center developer, which is planning to develop a sustainable 1GW hyperscale data center campus in Wyoming.
Writing on LinkedIn, Looney said he had been attracted to the project by the twin energy challenges facing data centers in the AI era - growing power demand and the increasing emissions generated by more powerful servers.
“The opportunity to address these challenges is why I’ve joined Prometheus Hyperscale as chairman,” he said. “I can’t think of a more exciting challenge. How do we deliver net positive AI. How do we unleash AI to propel the world forward.”
Looney had worked at BP for his entire career, starting out as a drilling engineer and ascending to the role of CEO, which he took up in February 2020. He left the firm under a cloud in September 2023, resigning after it was revealed he had not disclosed to the company’s board details of his past relationships with colleagues.
The company later dismissed him for “serious misconduct,” denying Looney £32 million ($40m) in pay and share awards.
When he was CEO, he initially pledged to make the company net zero by 2050 - but walked back that promise in early 2023, instead doubling down on fossil fuel production.
The company's Scope 3 emissions, caused by the burning of its oil and gas, increased to 315 million metric tons in 2023, helping increase anthropogenic climate change.
Formerly known as Wyoming Hyperscale, Prometheus Hyperscale is building a data center campus on 58 acres of land on Aspen Mountain, a remote site southeast of Evanston in Wyoming. The plan is the brainchild of landowner Trenton Thornock and, in September, the company brought Trevor Neilson on board as president and rebranded as Prometheus.
At the same time, it revealed the projected capacity at the Wyoming site was being increased to 1GW, and that the company was planning to build data centers at four other data centers in Arizona and Colorado.
The company says the Aspen Mountain facility will be "the most advanced sustainable data center in the United States" once up and running, and has already pledged to utilize liquid cooling, with waste heat put to use on a nearby farm. Looney said in his LinkedIn post that cooling for the data center could also be provided by “underground reservoirs” without going into detail of how this would work.
In May, Prometheus agreed to a deal to buy 100MW of energy from small nuclear reactor startup Oklo.
Neilson said he had met Looney when BP invested in one of his past ventures and added he was “thrilled” to work with the former oil and gas executive.
“Bernard's extensive experience in energy and sustainability aligns perfectly with our mission to develop cutting-edge data centers that support the growing demands of artificial intelligence,” he said.
