WYOMING HYPERSCALE
line coming out of the switch where this wind power converges on the grid . As a former commodities firm CFO … We see a lot of our competitors going out and buying swaps or entering into power purchase agreements , but the electrons that they ' re consuming are not actually green . They ' re probably coming from a gas fired or coalfired plant somewhere .”
This would have been the case for Wyoming Hyperscale , until it wasn ’ t .
“ In November 2021 , when Bill Gates and TerraPower announced they ' re building an advanced nuclear reactor in Kemmerer , Wyoming , which happens to be where the base load power on our local grid comes from … By 2028 , we ' ll be still plugged into the same wind switch , but the baseload power on that grid is going to be nuclear . We ' ll be on one of the first completely decarbonised , non-hydro grids in North America . So now you ' ve got a situation where the entire power generation is decarbonised . You ' ve got a data centre that ' s 50 % more efficient from a power consumption standpoint than air-cooled data centres . And it consumes no water .”
Thornock has also made sure the project is linked into key data centre clusters and is using fibre in the area that is lying unused .
“ I think that it ' s important to note for people who want to understand the project that even though we ' re still in the construction phase , through our partnership with Lumen , we ' ve activated a lot of the dark fibre that was already terminated near the site ,” says Thornock .
Aspen Mountain itself has a history that made this possible . It is one of the highest points on the Union Pacific railway line . Fibre cannot be laid inside active rail tunnels , so telecoms companies instead had to run them over the mountain to rejoin the tracks
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