American Electric Power plans to invest about $4 billion in a 702-MW fuel cell plant near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Google will buy its output under a 20-year power purchase agreement, AEP announced on Oct. 14, 2026. The plant will use Bloom Energy's fuel cells. AEP said it and its partners plan to start construction in 2026 and expect the facility to be fully operational by the end of 2028.

The deal terms

Google will buy the power from Cheyenne Fuel Cell, LLC, which AEP said is about 92% owned and controlled by AEP, with funds advised by Basalt Infrastructure Partners, LLP holding nearly 8%. The fuel cells generate electricity without burning natural gas, and the project includes plans to integrate carbon capture technology, which AEP described as delivering near-zero-emissions power. The release gave no separate schedule or cost for the carbon capture equipment.

"As power demand continues to grow, AEP is bringing together new technologies and strong partnerships to deliver reliable, innovative energy solutions quickly and at scale," Bill Fehrman, AEP's chairman, president and chief executive, said in the announcement.

AEP set the project against its plan to invest $78 billion from 2026 through 2030. POWER reported that the Wyoming plant is among the opportunities outside that base plan, part of what AEP has called line of sight to more than $10 billion of incremental investment.

Where Google's Cheyenne campus gets its power

AEP said the project follows agreements between Google and Black Hills Corp. that took effect Sept. 30, which ESG Today described as supplying Google's planned data center in Cheyenne. Under those agreements, Black Hills will serve the campus through 2048 with a 2.7-GW resource portfolio, including reserves, POWER reported: up to 590 MW of grid-connected service and roughly 2.1 GW of third-party contracted resources managed through a private microgrid. Black Hills plans to invest $1.8 billion in 564 MW of natural gas generation at its existing Cheyenne Prairie Generating Station through a nonregulated affiliate, and says the agreements are structured so that Google bears all costs of serving the data center.

The campus is part of Google's proposed $17 billion Project Tembo, which in its revised form includes four data center buildings totaling about 3.08 million square feet, according to POWER.

A fuel cell order two years in the making

The Wyoming plant grows out of a supply agreement that dates to November 2024, when Bloom announced that AEP had signed on for up to 1 GW of its fuel cells and placed an initial 100-MW order, a deal Bloom called the largest commercial fuel cell procurement in the world to date. Bloom has since signed other large data center arrangements; in October 2025, it and Brookfield announced a partnership under which Brookfield will invest up to $5 billion to deploy Bloom's fuel cells, with Bloom becoming the preferred onsite power provider for Brookfield's AI factories.

POWER traced the Cheyenne project through AEP's securities filings. AEP's January 2026 SEC filing described an unregulated subsidiary agreeing to buy a substantial portion of its fuel cell option for about $2.65 billion, tied to a 20-year offtake agreement with an unnamed investment-grade customer, POWER reported. AEP originally expected the offtake conditions to be met by the second quarter of 2026; the deadline was extended in June by mutual agreement, and if the revised conditions are not satisfied in December 2026, AEP would receive "additional consideration."

On AEP's July 30 earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Trevor Mihalik said "those fuel cells need to be installed and ready to go by the end of 2028" to qualify for the investment tax credit, and that AEP was "adequately compensated for that adjustment" to the timeline, as quoted by POWER. Under the original December 2026 milestone, POWER reported, the customer could deploy the fuel cells at another location if the Cheyenne site did not advance.

The plant would be about seven times the size of AEP's previous fuel cell deployment, POWER reported: roughly 98 MW of fuel cell service that AEP's Ohio utility contracted in 2025 to supply two Central Ohio data centers operated by Amazon Web Services and Cologix.

A second generation deal the day before

On Oct. 13, Mainspring Energy announced that AEP had bought an initial 190 MW of its linear generators for delivery beginning in 2027, under an agreement covering up to 1.6 GW through 2034, according to POWER. Mainspring called it "the largest procurement of linear generators to date."

What Happens Next

  • Oct. 28, 2026: AEP is scheduled to report third-quarter results and introduce its 2027–2031 capital plan, according to POWER.
  • December 2026: Deadline for the revised offtake conditions in the fuel cell purchase disclosed in AEP's January filing.
  • Construction: AEP plans to begin in 2026, with full operation expected by the end of 2028.
  • Open question: Neither AEP nor Black Hills has confirmed whether the Bloom plant counts toward Black Hills' 2.1 GW of third-party resources for the Google campus, POWER reported.

Sources