An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.
“It’s a game changer. It’s huge,” Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday.
With cool weather — good for keeping computer temperatures down — and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming’s capital has become a hub of computing power.
The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.
The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement.
A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that’s more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people.
And it’s a major exporter of energy. A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA.
But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.
Gov. Mark Gordon praised the project’s value to the state’s gas industry.
“This is exciting news for Wyoming and for Wyoming natural gas producers,” Gordon said in the statement.
While data centers are energy-hungry, experts say companies can help reduce their effect on the climate by powering them with renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Even so, electricity customers might see their bills increase as utilities plan for massive data projects on the grid.
The data center would be built several miles (kilometers) south of Cheyenne off U.S. 85 near the Colorado state line. State and local regulators would need to sign off on the project, but Collins was optimistic construction could begin soon.
“I believe their plans are to go sooner rather than later,” Collins said.
OpenAI, the developer of Chat GPT, has been scouring the U.S. for sites for a massive AI data center effort called Stargate, but a Crusoe spokesperson declined to say if the Cheyenne project was one.
“We are not at a stage that we are ready to announce our tenant there,” said the spokesperson, Andrew Schmitt. “I can’t confirm or deny that is going to be one of the stargate.”
Recently, OpenAI announced it had switched on the first phase of a Crusoe-built data center complex in Abilene, Texas, in a partnership with software giant Oracle.
“To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest data center — we think of it as a campus — in the world,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told The Associated Press last week. “It generates, roughly and depending how you count, about a gigawatt of energy.”
OpenAI has also been looking elsewhere in the U.S. to expand its data centers. It said last week that it has entered into an agreement with Oracle to develop another 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity.
“We’re now in a position where we have, in a really concrete way, identified over five gigawatts of energy that we’re going to be able to build around,” Lehane said.
OpenAI hasn’t named any locations, besides its flagship site in Texas, where it plans to build data centers.
As of earlier this year, Wyoming was not one of the 16 states where OpenAI said it was looking for locations to build new data centers.
President Donald Trump is getting his way with the world economy.
Trading partners from the European Union to Japan to Vietnam appear to be acceding to the president’s demands to accept higher costs — in the form of high tariffs — for the privilege of selling their wares to the United States. For Trump, the agreements, driven by a mix of threats and cajoling, are a fulfillment of a decades-long belief in protectionism and a massive gamble that it will pay off politically and economically with American consumers.
On Sunday, the United States and the 27-member state European Union announced that they had reached a trade framework agreement: The EU agreed to accept 15% U.S. tariffs on most of its goods, easing fears of a catastrophic trans-Atlantic trade war. There were also commitments by the EU to buy $750 billion in U.S. energy products and make $600 billion in new investments through 2028, according to the White House.
“We just signed a very big trade deal, the biggest of them all,” Trump said Monday.
But there’s no guarantee that Trump’s radical overhaul of U.S. trade policy will deliver the happy ending he’s promised. The framework agreement was exceedingly sparse on details. Most trade deals require months and even years of painstaking negotiation that rise and fall on granular details.
High-stakes negotiations break Trump’s way
Financial markets, at first panicked by the president’s protectionist agenda, seem to have acquiesced to a world in which U.S. import taxes — tariffs — are at the highest rates they’ve been in roughly 90 years. Several billion in new revenues from his levies on foreign goods are pouring into the U.S. Treasury and could somewhat offset the massive tax cuts he signed into law on July 4.
Outside economists say that high tariffs are still likely to raise prices for American consumers, dampen the Federal Reserve’s ability to lower interest rates, and make the U.S. economy less efficient over time. Democrats say the middle class and poor will ultimately pay for the tariffs.
“It’s pretty striking that it’s seen as a sigh of relief moment,” said Daniel Hornung, a former Biden White House economic official who now holds fellowships at Housing Finance Policy Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But if the new baseline across all trading partners is 15%, that is a meaningful drag on growth that increases recession risks, while simultaneously making it harder for the Fed to cut.”
The EU agreement came just four days after Japan also agreed to 15% U.S. tariffs and to invest in the United States. Earlier, the United States reached deals that raised tariffs on imports from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom considerably from where they’d been before Trump returned to the White House.
More one-sided trade deals are likely as countries try to beat a Friday deadline, after which Trump will impose even higher tariffs on countries that refuse to make concessions.
Trump’s long-held theory now faces reality
The U.S. president has long claimed that America erred by not taking advantage of its clout as the world’s biggest economy and erecting a wall of tariffs, in effect making other countries ante up for access to America’s massive consumer market.
To his closest aides, Trump’s use of tariffs has validated their trust in his skills as a negotiator and their belief that the economists who warned of downturns and inflation were wrong. The S&P 500 stock index was basically flat on Monday, but stocks have more than recovered from the tariff-induced selloff in April.
“Where are the ‘experts’ now?” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on X.
But the story is not over. For one thing, many of the details of Trump’s trade deals remain somewhat hazy and have not been captured in writing. The U.S. and Japan, for instance, have offered differing descriptions of Japan’s agreement to invest $550 billion in the United States.
“The trade deals do seem to count as a qualified win for Trump, with other countries giving the U.S. favorable trade terms while accepting U.S. tariffs,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist. “However, certain terms of the deals, such as other countries’ investments in the U.S., seem more promising in the abstract than they might prove in reality over time.’'
Trump is also facing a court challenge from states and businesses arguing that the president overstepped his authority by declaring national emergencies to justify the tariffs on most of the world’s economies. In May, a federal court struck down those tariffs. And an appeals court, which agreed to let the government continue collecting the tariffs for now, will hear oral arguments in the case Thursday.
And he’s yet to reach an accord with China — which has deftly used the threat of retaliatory tariffs and withholding exports of rare earth minerals that are desperately needed for electric vehicles, computer chips and wind turbines to avoid caving in to Trump’s demands. The U.S. and China are talking this week in Stockholm, Sweden.
Economists remain skeptical of the impacts on US consumers
There is also skepticism that tariffs will produce the economic boom claimed by Trump.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley said “the most likely outcome is slow growth and firm inflation,” but not a recession. After all, the 15% tariffs on the EU and Japan are a slight increase from the 10% rate that Trump began charging in April during a negotiation period.
While autos made in the EU and Japan will no longer face the 25% tariffs Trump had imposed, they will still face a 15% tax that has yet to appear in prices at U.S. dealerships. The administration has said the lack of auto price increases suggests that foreign producers are absorbing the costs, but it might ultimately just reflect the buildup of auto inventories to front-run the import taxes.
“Dealers built stocks ahead of tariff implementation, damping the immediate impact on retail prices. That cushion is starting to wear thin,” Morgan Stanley said in a separate note. “Our Japan auto analyst notes that as pre-tariff inventory clears, replacement vehicles will likely carry higher price tags.”
Economist Mary Lovely of the Peterson Institute for International Economics warned of a “slow-burn efficiency loss’’ as U.S. companies scramble to adjust to Trump’s new world. For decades, American companies have mostly paid the same tariffs – and often none at all – on imported machinery and raw materials from all over the world.
Now, as a result of Trump’s trade deals, tariffs vary by country. “U.S. firms have to change their designs and get inputs from different places based on these variable tariff rates,’’ she said. “It’s an incredible administrative burden. There’s all these things that are acting as longer-term drags on economy, but their effect will show up only slowly.’’
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that the United States’ effective tariff rate has risen to 17.5% from around 2.5% at the start of the year.
“I wouldn’t take a victory lap,’' Zandi said. ”The economic damage caused by the higher tariffs will mount in the coming months.’'
The European Union’s trade agreement with the Trump administration is getting mixed reviews. EU officials say they warded off a total economic disaster. But French officials in particular say the EU punched below its weight while economists say the deal is dangerously vague.
The deal leaves Europe with a 15% tariff on most goods imported into the U.S., with some goods categories tariff-free, but no agreement on rates for key areas such as pharmaceuticals and steel.
Here is what they’re saying:
European Commission
Failing to reach a deal by the Aug. 1 deadline would have meant a 30% tariff threatened by U.S. President Donald Trump, EU chief trade negotiator Maroš Šefčovič said.
The main aim of European officials was a negotiated agreement, rather than a tit-for-tat escalation that could have included retaliatory EU tariffs on 93 billion euros ($108 billion) worth of goods, including U.S. agricultural products, steel and chemicals.
“A trade war may seem appealing to some, but it comes with serious consequences, with at least a 30% tariff,” Šefčovič said. “Our trans-Atlantic trade would effectively come to a halt, putting close to 5 million jobs, including those in SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) in Europe, at grave risk.
“Our businesses have sent us a unanimous message: avoid escalation and work towards a solution that delivers immediate relief,” he said.
France: ‘A dark day’
Major exports to the U.S.: Aircraft, pharmaceuticals, luxury perfumes and leather goods, wine and spirits.
Senior French officials on Monday criticized the accord, with Foreign Trade Minister Laurent Saint-Martin urging a European response in the services sector, and Strategy Commissioner Clément Beaune warning it underplayed the 27-nation bloc’s economic strength.
“The good news is that there is an agreement — our companies now have visibility and stability in the trans-Atlantic trade relationship,” Saint-Martin said on France Inter radio. “But this agreement is not balanced, and we will need to keep working.”
He pointed to digital services as a key front in the trade imbalance. “Donald Trump spent months saying he wanted to rebalance a trade relationship that disadvantages the United States, but he was only talking about goods. If we look at services, it’s the opposite. So it’s up to us now to carry out the work of force and rebalancing,” he said.
“The United States decided to use force to impose a new law of the jungle that no longer respects the rules of international trade that we had for decades,” Saint-Martin said.
Beaune, France’s high commissioner for strategy and planning, said on franceinfo radio that “this is an unequal and unbalanced agreement.” He warned that “Europe did not wield its strength. We are the world’s leading trading power.”
“When you look at it, the glass is a quarter full and three-quarters empty,” Beaune said.
Prime Minister François Bayrou was even more scathing, posting on X: “It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to uphold their values and defend their interests, resigns itself to submission.”
Germany: ‘Avoided unnecessary escalation’
Major exports to the U.S.: Motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals and industrial machinery.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the deal would give companies a more predictable environment to plan and invest — a key EU goal after weeks of back-and-forth threats in tense talks with Trump administration officials.
“It is good that Europe and the USA have agreed and thus avoided an unnecessary escalation in trans-Atlantic trade relations,” he said. “We have been able to preserve our core interests, even if I would have very much wished for further relief in trans-Atlantic trade.”
Asked about negative reactions to the deal from German business, Merz countered that it was met with relief by some companies and sectors.
However, “it is completely clear to me that the tariffs that now remain — in particular the 15% against 0% for imports to the European Union — constitute a significant burden for the export-oriented economy of the Federal Republic of Germany,” Merz said, noting that he had said repeatedly before the agreement that “there will be an asymmetric deal, if there is one at all.”
Italy: ‘Positive outcome’
Major exports to the U.S.: Industrial machinery, cars and agricultural products.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who has positioned herself as a “bridge” between the Trump administration and Europe, welcomed news of the tariff agreement as a “positive” outcome that avoided an “unpredictable and potentially devastating” trade war.
But in comments to reporters on the sidelines of a U.N. food security conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she said that details still needed to be worked out and that she’s still unclear what exemptions are carved out for particular industries.
“I always thought, I continue to think that a trade escalation between Europe and the United States would have unpredictable, potentially devastating consequences,” she said.
Meloni said that she needed to understand what the exemptions might be, including on agricultural products, which are of concern to Italy, given its wine exports in particular.
“So there are a number of elements that are missing as well, as I don’t know exactly what we are referring to when we talk about investments, gas purchases.”
She noted that the deal in its current form is legally nonbinding in principle, “so there is still, let’s say, room to fight.”
Hungary: Trump ‘ate EU for breakfast’
Major exports to the U.S.: Packaged medicines and batteries.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of Trump who has gained a following within the MAGA movement, blasted the agreement on Monday as a failure on the part of Europe’s leadership.
“Even at first glance, it is obvious to me that this is not an agreement,” Orbán said in a video discussion with his party’s spokesman. “Donald Trump ate (European Commission President) Ursula von der Leyen for breakfast, that’s what happened.”
Orbán, a frequent EU critic, has been careful not to criticize Trump’s administration for its trade policy, instead faulting the bloc for being unable to conclude a comprehensive tariff agreement with Washington.
Orbán said that a U.S.-U.K. trade deal, which imposed a blanket 10% tariff on British exports, was more favorable than the one concluded with the EU.
“The American president is a heavyweight negotiator, and (von der Leyen) is a featherweight,” Orbán said. “The European agreement is worse than the British one, so portraying it as a success will be difficult.”
Economists: Less growth, many blank spots
Jon Harrison at TS Lombard: “It is no surprise to find that trade deals agreed under duress in weeks rather than the usual years of careful negotiation leave a mass of detail incomplete and open to interpretation.”
Jack Allen-Reynolds, deputy chief eurozone economist at Capital Economics: “We think this will reduce EU GDP (gross domestic product) by about 0.5%, which is worse than we had previously assumed.”
“While the deal has avoided a much worse outcome for now, it remains to be seen whether it will last.”
Julian Hinz, trade expert at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy: “The deal agreed yesterday is not a good deal — it is appeasement.
“While the EU may avert a trade war in the short term, it is paying a high price in the long term by abandoning the principles of the multilateral, rules-based world trade system of the World Trade Organization.”
Chipotle's AI-driven chatbot name Ava Cado appears to be meeting expectations, successfully slashing the time it takes to hire by 75%. The bot, made by Paradox, not only speaks several languages but helps candidates complete job applications based on information they share. Most importantly, perhaps, for a restaurant network expanding in several countries, Ava Cado can seamlessly schedule interviews for human managers — who take over when it comes to actually hiring a projected 9,000 to 10,000 new staff per year.
Samsung appears to be closing in on Apple, according to new Canalys data. The smartphone giant's U.S. shipments surged 38% year-over-year last quarter, and its U.S. market share climbed from 23% to 31%. Alternatively, iPhone U.S. shipments declined 11% year-over-year, despite renewed growth in China. Meanwhile, the overall U.S. smartphone market grew a marginal 1%, as companies combat softening consumer demand and reshuffle supply chains to try to escape tariff fallout. Also on Monday, Samsung announced plans to partner with Tesla on an AI chip.
Anthropic is implementing usage limits for subscribers of its Claude Code artificial intelligence tool in order to cope with what the company calls “unprecedented demand.” The restrictions, which go into effect on Aug. 28, apply to users of Anthropic’s Pro and Max subscription plans. Anthropic says the move is a response to certain subscribers who are running Claude Code around the clock and a “small number” of users selling or resharing accounts. The usage limits will apply to less than 5% of Anthropic’s subscription base.
EssilorLuxottica's smart glass partnership with Meta helped boost the French-Italian sunglass giant to a 7.3% year-over-year jump in revenue for both its most recent quarter and its most recent half-year. Sales of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses more than tripled over the first half of the year, with an Oakley collection on deck. However, growth for the company — which also owns retailers Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters — was stronger in Europe than in the U.S., where tariffs impacted sales.
The administration is shifting the goalposts on tariffs again. And you could have seen it coming. If the deals with Japan and the European Union are for 15% tariffs, then why should other trading partners get lower rates?
So the new baseline is looking like 15% or 20% instead of 10%. That's right, maybe a casual doubling of the tariff for the rest of the world. And those deals with Japan and the European Union... well, they might not be worth much at all for the terms of trade, if they're just offering the same treatment as everyone else is getting.
Of course, we don't know if the president is just returning to the White House kitchen, cooking up another batch of his famous TACOs. But I sense that, once again, the administration realizes that it needs these tariffs.
It needs them to keep its campaign promises. It needs them for the revenue. It needs them to close the ever-larger budget gap that its own tax cuts and spending are opening up, to the great detriment of the nation's fiscal situation.
So how much will consumers be affected? Once again, imports (including intermediate goods) make up about 11% of household spending. An increase in prices of 15% from our previously tiny average tariff rates, combined with 2.5% inflation on the other 89% of things we buy, would give us overall inflation of 3.9%.
That's about double the Federal Reserve's target of 2%, and it's enough to make most Americans sit up and take notice. Consumers are already postponing purchases of big-ticket durable goods, and they're already paying more for food and apparel. Soon they may try to pull back on those purchases, too.
How high can tariffs go before prices start to affect demand? How high can tariffs go before the labor market suffers? Either way, the consumer could finally crack. And that's when this whole thing falls apart.