As reported in the Herald in November 2024, the long process of building a $10 billion data center east of Evanston, on 640 acres of ranch land, is underway, due to the efforts of Trenton Thornock, founder and senior advisor of the corporation Prometheus Hyperscale.
Quoted in the 2024 original article, Thornock said, “The predictions are that the need for huge data centers in the U.S. will increase by 33% a year. I want Evanston to reap the benefits of having a sustainable data center located here.”
The Herald recently visited with Thornock again to learn of the progress on the data center and to provide answers to concerns expressed by community residents. The three main concerns center on these questions:
Thornock, Prometheus Hyperscale Chief of Staff Abby Pick and Build Wyoming Director Eric Schlidt met with the Herald via video conference earlier this month.
To the question regarding power costs, Thornock said, “There should be no increase in power costs to residents in the community. We are not connecting to the grid. There are multiple natural gas lines and we plan to use existing natural gas lines and do laterals into the site of the data center. We don’t plan to use solar or wind initially, but perhaps in the future.”
In May of 2025, Prometheus Hyperscale announced a partnership with PureWest, Wyoming’s largest natural gas producer, and with Frontier Carbon Solutions, the country’s leader in carbon capture and storage.
Thornock said the latter partnership will allow Prometheus to offer zero-carbon dispatchable power. PureWest’s verified low-carbon natural gas and Frontier’s advanced carbon capture and storage solutions will enable Prometheus to build sustainable, next-generation data centers for the age of AI, he said.
In the 2024 story, Thornock stated that Prometheus Hyperscale would use zero water. They had received EPA permits to drill down about 1,000 feet to an aquifer, which is deep and well below what would be used for drinking water or agricultural needs. However, they now say they will not use the aquifer, but will be using a closed-loop cooling system.
Pick emphasized that Prometheus Hyperscale data centers are designed to minimize water use. Instead of using large amounts of water to cool the air around the servers, their data centers will use a closed-loop cooling system that never draws from or discharges to local water supplies.
“Think of it like a car radiator, but for computers,” Pick wrote. “A cooling fluid runs through pipes attached directly to the hottest parts of the server (often the chips). It picks up the heat, moves it out of the building, releases it and loops back to do it again. The fluid is a mix of water and propylene glycol (PG25) – the same ingredient used in food coloring and some medicines. It is non-toxic and the loop is sealed, so nothing gets released into the environment.”
When the system is started up, it is filled with the water-glycol mixture brought to the site by a manufacturer. The cooling fluid never touches drinking water, Pick said. It runs through a completely separate, sealed system inside the data center building with no connection to the public water supply. Liquid cooling has been deployed in high-performance computing environments for years and is increasingly the standard for modern AI infrastructure.
Thornock said he planned to take Evanston Mayor Kent Williams and Uinta County GIS Coordinator Gary Welling on a tour of a West Jordan, Utah, data center that uses a closed-loop system so they would be able to see firsthand how it works.
As to the final concern regarding the impact on community resources by hundreds or even thousands of workers, Schlidt and Thornock both said they are working on an agreement with Target Hospitality to relieve that concern.
Target Hospitality is working with the county commission to obtain a portion of the 1,000 acres next to the Bear River State Park to build workforce housing, or a man camp. The facility will include 2,500 beds and will be more like a small community, they said, offering the workers a small recreation center, a golf center and a small convenience store. The purpose is to lessen the impact on the city of Evanston.
In November 2024, the proposed date for the beginning of construction was January 2025. Thornock now states, pending all permits being approved, the date for beginning construction will be in six to nine months, which could be as early as November. Projected date of operation is by the end of 2027.
“The tenant and some final permits are still pending,” Thornock said. “It will be nice to see the data center finally materialize.”
There are two meetings scheduled to discuss the controversial project. The first is today, Tuesday, May, 26, at 3:30 p.m. in the Portland Rose room at the Evanston Roundhouse. The Planning and Zoning Commission will also hold a public hearing the following evening at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27, at the commission chambers at the Uinta County Complex.
