Trenton Thornock's family has ranched land in southwest Wyoming for six generations.

“I spent most of my summers in Wyoming,” Thornock said, “riding north of the interstate here moving cattle.”

Right now, it’s quiet, with a herd of stocky black cows grazing in an wide open landscape dotted with yellow flowers. But the rolling foothills could soon be home to a massive new artificial intelligence data center from the company Prometheus Hyperscale, which happens to have been started by Thornock himself.

He left Wyoming for a finance career, but now he has a way to make money here: building data centers in the Wild West. And he’s also finding ways to power them.

“So right here, we're measuring the amount of sunlight that we get during the day,” Thornock said, pointing to a weather station at the site near Evanston, Wyoming.

That’s for solar panels, which potential big tech customers, like Google and Meta, might want. Thornock points to a row of wind turbines next.

“We sit right in the middle of all of this renewable energy infrastructure,” he said.

Across the West, AI data centers are popping up left and right in cities, foothills and even on cattle ranches. With all that competition, being sustainable can give these centers an extra edge as they try to attract big tech. Data centers suck up energy and water. Some companies, like Prometheus, want to use less.

Thornock says this will be a net-zero carbon emissions data center. It will recycle water, use efficient cooling systems and take advantage of heat from servers to grow microgreens and farm shrimp. It’ll also produce all its own power, but Thornock said not only from renewables.

“You’ve got gas pipelines on both sides for natural gas generation,” he said.

The bulk of its electricity, at least for now, is slated to come from fossil fuels, natural gas, which is abundant in Wyoming.

In the long run, the plan is for data centers like Prometheus to transition to small modular reactors, mini nuclear plants, but the tech is still a ways off.

So why not fill the gap with wind and solar?

“A thousand-megawatt wind farm does not provide the same capacity as a thousand-megawatt coal plant or a natural gas plant,” said Mary Throne, general counsel at Prometheus.

Some data centers need as much power as a small city, especially hyperscale ones like Prometheus.

Powering with renewables would also require giant, costly batteries for when it’s dark and there’s no wind.

“We really need to be more forward thinking and more open to taking advantage of all sources of energy,” Throne said. “Technology is our friend.”

Throne said that includes technology like carbon capture. Prometheus aims to get to net-zero carbon emissions by injecting CO2 from other sources into the ground nearby.

But Amory Lovins, a Stanford energy professor, said that sounds like a sketchy model. “It's a lot more straightforward to make your own clean power on site,” Lovins said.

He added that carbon capture is also expensive and doesn’t always store CO2 at the rate promised. He said it is possible to power data centers on 100% renewables, like one outside Reno, Nevada, that runs on solar and used electric car batteries.

“So, I don't think you need to mess with offsets if you're making the power right in the first place,” Lovins said.

All big tech companies are saying they can be leaders in AI without destroying the climate. Google, Meta and Microsoft promise to reach net zero by 2030, but their emissions have risen in recent years.

Trenton Thornock said Prometheus — named for the titan of foresight in Greek mythology — will build the first net-zero data center. Driving down a bumpy, dirt road, he said the data center is another way to steward this sagebrush landscape.

“We hope to be here for many more generations, and my nephews and nieces will someday inherit the ranch,” he said.

Although they may find themselves to be data wranglers, rather than cowboys, in the decades to come.