The United Conservative Party Government must be encountering stiffer opposition than it expected to its plan to make Alberta North America’s dumping ground for the Artificial Intelligence data centres that citizens most everywhere else are organizing to fight.
Consider the slick propaganda section that’s appeared on the Government of Alberta’s official website, which bizarrely tries to pass off water- and energy-gobbling hyperscale data centres as “digital refineries.”
The site’s first goal is obviously to get voters on side with the massive Sturgeon County data centre planned by Meta Platforms Inc. a few kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
When it was announced in Calgary on July 4, the government and company said it would cost $13 billion and be the largest AI data centre in Canada. But it didn’t take long for anxiety about the project, and the $100 billion the UCP hopes to see spent building data centres throughout Wild Rose Country, to start giving lots of Albertans the willies.
Waxing poetic about the inevitable and happy future of AI data centres in Alberta, the microsite within Alberta.ca has the look and feel of something developed by communications consultants from outside the province. Maybe they thought folks here are yokels, who ought to be easy to fool.
“What is a data centre, really?” it asks patronizingly. “When people say ‘the cloud,’ they mean a data centre. There is no cloud. There is just somebody else’s computer, in a big building, doing work on your behalf. AI data centres are the next generation of the same infrastructure. Instead of mostly storing information, they are built to think.” (Do you think they asked AI to write this drivel?)
Straining logic only a little, the website advises readers just to think of the 700-plus-hectare 24/7/365 operation planned by Meta and the massive separately owned natural-gas-fired power plant nearby to power it “as digital refineries.”
For 50 years, the authors (be they humanoid or digital) tell us, Albertans have asked: “Why don’t we refine more of our own resources here at home?” (This remains a good question, actually.)
“Alberta produces about 60 per cent of Canada’s natural gas,” story time continues. “A data centre refines that gas, in stages, into the most valuable commodity of our time. Gas becomes electricity. Electricity becomes computing power. Computing power becomes intelligence: the answers, predictions and tools the world is buying.”
“Then the product ships through fibre optic cable, at the speed of light. A digital pipeline that crosses borders without a decade of regulatory battles, carries the finished product instead of the raw one, and never sells at a discount.” (The real finished product, dear readers, is my prose and yours, scraped from the Internet without so much as a by-your-leave. That’s what we used to call a five-finger discount!)
If this kind of derp makes you think of what a cryptocurrency telemarketer might sound like, you’re probably onto something.
For the most part, the rest of the site falls back on the same tendentious talking points the government and a Meta spokesperson trotted out at their July 4 news conference.
The plant won’t use a lot of water because it will have a closed-loop cooling system. (OK, but what about the gas-fired power plant next door?) Data centre operators in Alberta must provide their own power so your rates won’t go up. (But Meta’s plant is supposed to draw some power from the de-regulated provincial grid – so what about the law of supply and demand?) Don’t worry about the AI bubble bursting, private investors are carrying all the risk. “When any facility reaches the end of its life, the company that built it is responsible for decommissioning it.” (You know, just like all those unfunded orphan wells.)
Do you have questions about the regulatory side of this industry? Well, never mind. They aren’t addressed by this spin site. Like the cloud, I guess, there are no answers.
What is obvious is that the UCP very badly wants you to think there is no downside to AI data centres. It’s worth asking why.
In fact, there are many persuasive arguments for Alberta to pause and think carefully about the environmental, social and financial impacts of these water and power greedy megaprojects. But a recent poll suggested most Albertans have not yet cottoned onto those concerns. So it was probably inevitable the UCP would turn up the pressure on this sales job while Albertans were still unsure of what to think.
The Léger polling firm’s online survey of 1,000 Albertans was in the field from July 17 to 19, asking respondents what they thought about the Sturgeon County facility. Léger found that right now more voters support the project than oppose it – thanks, no doubt, to the government’s heavy promotion.
When Léger asked what Albertans thought of the project based on what they knew, “support outweighed opposition, though not by a wide margin: 44 per cent supported the project, 36 per cent opposed it and 20 per cent were unsure or had not heard enough,” the pollster said.
But when the pollster added in the province’s talking points, including dubious claims the centre won’t use much water, that it will create lots of construction jobs and a few permanent ones, and that Meta will build and pay for energy generation, “with that fuller picture, 57 per cent described the project as a good deal for Alberta, compared with 27 per cent who considered it a bad deal.”
But those numbers aren’t good for the UCP if you consider that as Albertans start to hear arguments against the Meta data centre and others like it, the dial on public perception of the project will probably move again.
As for the supposedly rosy future of AI, just because it can do interesting things doesn’t guarantee it will return profits to its investors, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman warned on Wednesday.
“The huge capital expenditures we’ve been seeing by AI and AI-related companies were only justifiable if (a) AI delivers big economic payoffs – which even pathbreaking technologies don’t always do – and (b) first-movers are able to capture a large share of those returns, rather than find them competed away by second-movers offering products that are cheaper and almost as good,” Dr. Krugman wrote on his Substack last week. “In this case that especially means Chinese companies with lighter-weight models that use much less compute but do most of what ChatGPT and Claude do for a much lower price.”
He suggested that “the triumph of hype over experience” is about to come to an end. But not in Alberta, the UCP clearly hopes.
On Thursday, The New York Times fretted that Wall Street is getting “the jitters” about how much Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are spending to build data centres – “a staggering $1.5 trillion.”
“Alarms are rising as Wall Street and others question when this spending can be justified,” the author wrote in that understated way Times editors encourage.
So are AI data centres, as the UCP tells us, soon going to be “turning Alberta energy into something the whole world is lining up to buy”? I dunno. But didn’t they just tell us the same thing about Bitcoin mining?
There are concerns about data centers, particularly in rural Alberta. Fortunately for the UCP, the main opposition party doesn’t connect with or seem to understand rural Alberta that well, at least so far.
However, there is a growing list of things where the UCP is offside with its rural base, from oil companies not paying property taxes, reduced operating hours for rural hospitals, coal mining in the eastern slopes and now data centers. Sooner or later someone may figure out this out and start talking about all of this more.
I feel to some extent the UCP already realizes this weakness so this advertising campaign is in part a response to that, as well as public concern about data centers.
It is true they will mostly have their own power facilities, so they should not strain our power grid. However, one of the main reasons for them is to increase demand for natural gas and so increase its price. This means the plants that produce power for the rest of us will also have to pay more for their natural gas and that higher cost will be passed on to all Alberta power users. Unfortunately the too clever communications campaign by the UCP ignores this. As well there are valid environmental and land use concerns it dismisses or ignores.
The UCP may be a bit ahead in the battle for public opinion on data centers right now, but it may find it harder to maintain as people start to think about them more.
The NDP are holding public consultations in August:
https://www.albertandpcaucus.ca/ai-data-centre-consultations
Facebook was complicit with Cambridge Analytica.
The management of Cambridge Analytica then created an entity, Emerdata, that had the same persons listed.
I have a distinct feeling that when Dingy Smith was in Florida kissing Trump and O’Leary’s asses, they made her an offer to become very wealthy if she played along and supported the data center concept. At no other time in the history of this province has anyone jumped on the bandwagon of a massive idea in such a big way.
While the water usage is one matter, the electricity is the most serious one. It says Meta will be providing their own power, but initially will draw power from the grid. It seems to me there were power blackouts over the last couple of winters and summers because of the draw on the already undersized grid. No doubt the data centers will have priority so more and more folks will suffer outages. Given the electricity rates in Alberta are the highest of any province in Canada, perhaps they should re-regulate the industry and reduce the bills we pay. The Minister keeps harping about it during questions period yet he is doing absolutely nothing.
There is a big difference between a server farm set up for cloud storage, such as OneDrive, Dropbox or iCloud, which only has to collate, sort, store and retrieve data, with modest processing requirements embedded in those processes — and the kind of processing-heavy installations required for crypto mining or running the Large Language Models underpinning AI to date.
Cloud storage has been around for quite some time, and to date, the physical infrastructure needed to support it has not been seen by the public or policymakers as burdensome. But the prospect of the kinds of data processing centres needed to support the rapid expansion of AI are orders of magnitude more demanding on computing resources, and follow closely on the heels of the expansion of crypto mining in terms of computing capacity. Since none of these things run on air or stardust, they are going to need vast amounts of electrical power, at a time when we are also trying to expand our electrical grids to support decarbonization of our energy supply.
Alberta doesn’t have significant hydroelectric generation, so much of that power is going to have to come from fossil fuels of one sort or another, unless these centres are mandated to set up solar and/or wind generation as a condition of approval. (Someone will probably also suggest nuclear power as part of the mix on this). It’s no wonder, then, that thoughtful people are raising concerns with this.
Then, of course, there’s the question of, do we really want AI at all? Some at least of the protesters are concerned with this question: not, we don’t want it here, but we don’t want it period.
https://www.politico.eu/article/hungary-shuts-down-paks-nuclear-plant-danube-drought-intensifies-energy-crisis/
Hungary faces “the most critical five days” ahead as a record drought in Central Europe has forced Budapest to shut down a nuclear power plant that generates 40 percent of the country’s electricity, Prime Minister Péter Magyar said Sunday.
Recent news has shown that during “testing”, AI thingmabobs have been hacking into other systems. Wonder if the person who found this theft was fired by the thieving groups, or if on the other end, was rewarded for finding this theft? Nonetheless, this “testing” theft should really by a reminder that there are motives built in to these AI thingmabobs that are not beneficial except to the creators of them in the first place.
I refer you to 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project (with Gordon Pinsent as the US President!)
Unlike some proposals like Kevin O’Leary’s speculative venture in the MD of Greenview, the Sturgeon County data centre is owned by one of the world’s biggest AI companies (Meta). Plus it will be located on land already zoned for heavy industry. Do I like everything about it? No. I wish it could be powered by renewables not natural gas. But it is not worse and maybe better than most of the heavy industries already located in this part of Sturgeon County.
This is a fair point, John. But at the risk of supporting another UCP talking point, while the future of AI may not be in question, its future as a commercially successful venture clearly is. There is a bubble and it will either burst, or deflate a little more slowly. Which raises interesting questions about why the UCP is pushing so hard for so much right now. But there will be a continued market for petroleum products even if (when) demand is replaced by electrification outside backward North America. As you point out, not all AI centre proposals are created equal, and it was certainly a strategy for the UCP to make the most vaible one public first. DJC
Aren’t bitcoin mines and data centres interchangeable?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bitcoin-mine-ai-data-centre-9.7229641
Power was out in many areas of B.C. on Saturday night through Monday morning due to raging wildfires and lightning storms. Gas stations and EV charging stations from Revelstoke to the Alberta border along Highway 1 were not operational. ATMs were down, too, with no power. Imagine being stuck in Golden with no gas and no money on a long weekend with hotels full. Gas was in short supply on either end, with long lines to refill. Power has since been restored to the TransCanada corridor, but no such luck in the east Kootenays.
It’s a good thing we have that BC–Alberta 500 kV intertie running from Cranbrook to Langdon. Alberta will never run short of electricity (at any cost), right? It’s a good thing Washington State doesn’t heavily trade electricity with B.C., too, because Washington State is on fire. Oh wait, they do? Yesterday more than 600 structures in Spokane burned.
Say, who are those anonymous posters on social media blaming the wildfire-destroyed transmission towers on B.C. Hydro and pride parades? Well, fair’s fair. When the Shepard Landfill Eco-Centre (toxic chemicals) had a massive fire yesterday, social media was ablaze with jokes about the “dumpster fire UCP government” and smoke signals turning from black to white to announce a new premier. (Read all about it in the local news. No, you can’t. They ignored it.)
Fire and no water. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Oh, Dani. The people are not happy. Was that dark cloud your toxic glue? Why are you attempting to burn Alberta to the ground, metaphorically and in reality?
There is now some brief coverage of the landfill fire, the day after it happened.
https://calgary.citynews.ca/2026/08/03/calgary-blazes-challenge-fire-dept-warns-of-potential-for-more-fires/
Rural Albertans ARE yokels who are trivially easy to fool. That’s the Alberta Advantage.
CX: I didn’t know YOU would say that, but I knew someone would. DJC
The Hinterland/Metropolis model/analysis has been around since bn Khaldun (1332–1406). The pace of progress!
There was no resisting that one.
Ditto
As is usually the case, the precautionary principle has been abandoned in the latest frenetic scheme to accumulate private profit as quickly as possible.
Negative spillovers (but not in Alberta, because Alberta is a special case with its own special leadership acting as corporate lobbyists) such as increased fossil gas burning and its consequences are ignored in favor of immediate monetary pay offs:
“Already, utility bills are rising as climate change drives more extreme weather and grid hardening costs. Deepening dependence on gas further piles on risks for ratepayers, and not only because gas worsens climate change.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14092025/data-center-ai-demand-natural-gas-power/
The current proposed solution for the natural gas surplus capacity “problem” (“In order to absorb potential economic output and forestall excess capacity, business interests must continuously search for new markets to exploit or entice existing customers who stand ready to buy the latest product, iteration, or service, and to induce new investment. . . . Inasmuch as neoliberalism produces waste as an attempt to exhaust the economic surplus through expansion of market share, waste is also deployed tactically to support the institutions of neoliberalism. With the assertion of the dominance of market priorities over those of the citizenry, business interests become the voice of authority that in previous generations belonged to the family, religion, and the state. That voice is communicated throughout media and popular culture, and more indirectly through marketing efforts and political activity.”) is both LNG and data center build out:
““Alberta gas storage remains plentiful and a bearish factor for AECO prices,” King said. Still, the Shell plc-led LNG Canada has nearly 2 Bcf/d capacity and could consume about 10% of the country’s supply this year, adding a major demand catalyst. Other export facilities are in the works as well.”
There are other very good reason why the downsides are both being ignored and not being communicated by the Alberta political class:
“And I think there’s a chance that A.I. is going to drive our bills even higher in the future. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that these facilities are using so much energy that utilities are building billions of dollars of infrastructure to support them and spreading those costs to all of us. And the second reason is that there are energy markets where utilities buy their power. And because demand from these A.I. energy centers is booming, it’s driving up prices, and we’re all paying those higher prices.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-ai-infrastructure-is-driving-a-sharp-rise-in-electricity-bills
But, Alberta, its leadership, and its people remains a special case, according to the prevailing myth that is constantly being peddled.
Well I’m going to be grumpy and wonder why they couldn’t even have come to Edmonton to make the announcement. I’m sure sick of all those cowboy hats. Bah Humbug!
I am far too much of a Luddite to get into the specifics but no, data centres built for AI cannot be adapted for other types of compute, I believe it is down to the infrastructure of the chips themselves. A better educated person could explain this in greater detail but they are specifically designed for AI.
A large number of the ones being built in the states do not currently have the chips needed for completion, as another aside. The data Center arms race is just another facet of the AI arms race in general. They are all banking on being the first one to have a novel technology (that doesn’t exist yet, and might never) and using that early status to squeeze out the competition and establish complete control over our society. No small stakes. The AI cowboys might try to couch it in more friendly terms but that’s the play.
The sad thing is China already won. Recent studies have shown that people paying for western models like Gemini And Chat GPT are already paying (I forget the exact numbers) something like 1000x more per compute than the comparable Chinese models, and their tech is improving, western companies are hoovering cash and really not getting any better at all, in fact some folks are alleging there are fatal flaws baked into the western models that are not going to be able to be resolved.
So what’s the deal ? Well, for one Gen Ai Is likely a smokescreen. Iran has been bombing the data centres of the big American tech companies. These guys may be spending unholy amounts of cash trying to become digital gods, but the other half of their business is selling services to the militaries and governments around the world. AI is dumb, it cannot create, it can only re organize that which exists already. But it’s REALLY good at sorting data, like keeping track of who’s a communist, or keeping track of which specific tents and ambulances to bomb in Gaza.
I wonder, which use case were the UCP pitched on ?
Rural voters are not buying the government’s BS on AI centres. Anti-AI groups are forming every day, even in Danielle Smith’s backyard of Foothills County. When Conservatives get mad, they don’t vote for the opposition. They stay home on election day. That’s what’s really got the UCP brain trust worried. (I use the words UCP and ‘brain’ loosely in the same sentence. Cunning – yes, brain – nope.)
It doesn’t matter where this AI data centre is located, it isn’t a good idea. As it is not equipped with its own power generation system yet, it will use the existing power grid in Alberta, and make our power bills that are already the most expensive in Canada, even more costlier. Deregulation of electricity from Ralph Klein was a big mistake, and the UCP did various things to drive up power prices, including a devious trick called economic withholding. The water consumption will be large, including for the power generator. Health of wildlife, and even humans will be compromised. Imagine living next to an airport. It will be that noisy, and constantly. When the UCP allows one of these AI data centres, they will allow more, regardless of opposition from Albertans. The UCP are ensuring their defeat, because they are doing far too many of the wrong things.
Rocky View County just voted for a moratorium on data centre proposals until regulations etc are in place:
https://medicinehatnews.com/news/local-news/2026/08/01/alberta-county-puts-moratorium-on-data-centre-proposals-after-public-pushback/
This background seems relevant: Last September the same council voted down a proposal to rezone some agricultural land for a data centre east of Balzac, after a passionate campaign against it by many local farmers. There were concerns about water, traffic, the waste of prime farmland, vague mitigation proposals, and annoyance that the farmers had short notice and needed to spend time on research and campaigning during their busy season.
It was also proposed that a gas plant would be built to power the data centre, and apparently that would use a lot of water too, I don’t know if they realised that. Plus the air pollution, etc.
The opposition to these AI data centres is warranted. Does the UCP and Danielle Smith even care? No.
He with the enormously punchable face, Nate Glubish (what a name!) seems to, like the rest of this rogues’ gallery, doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with black cowboy hats.
It’s either they don’t get out much, or they’ve been hitting the couch syrup pretty hard.
JM: Personally, I think Mr. Glubish looks goofy, but certainly not punchable. If 26 years of martial arts have taught me anything, it’s that it’s never a good idea to punch anyone, no matter how punchable they may look. I rather surprised a gentleman once who made that erroneous assumption about me. DJC
Hands up if you think AI is overhyped and is headed for a mighty crash, akin to the dotcom bust of the early 2000’s. I’ll start. (AI = average intelligence)
There is no question whatsoever that AI is another bubble. The criminal system that gave us the Asia crash and the dot-com crash and the Enron crash and the entire global system sub-prime crash and the covered-up-by-Covid crash and the bank-failures hidden by the Epstein bank, JP Morgan Chase, consuming the clapped-out scam operations averted crash; has been in no way whatsoever brought to heel. The question is how the bail-outs will work this time around.
That’s the multi-billion dollar question.
Does anyone, at least here, believe that the “power plant” will actually be built? If her history is anything to go by…
I do not see, or understand any benefit that these AI Data Centres represent, other than more monitoring and interfering with the lives of Canadians and the rest of the world population.
Some thoughts………………
First, AI Data Centres do not “think”. They perform complex mathematical calculations (based on algorithms) very quickly to deliver what is assumed to be logical data, using a lot of energy. While they can assimilate new data and derive updated outcomes, they are not capable of independent thought (unless AI has become sentient and is hiding that from humans….).
Second, there is a missing leg in the three legged stool. While you need electricity (powered via natural gas) and water, how do you get the “product” (gigabits of data) to market? They mention fibre optic cable at the speed of light. With many AI data centres in the middle of nowhere, who builds the fibre? Who pays for it? Where does the fibre connect to? Just like electrical power grids and pipelines, existing fibre optic networks have capacity limits. There are gigawatts of data that need to be transferred to markets, mostly in the US, who pays if fibre network upgrades are required?
I am also confused as to how large AI data centre warehouses and the accompanying gas fired power plants are not a blight on the landscape, using up valuable farmland, but solar and wind projects are. That can be a topic for another day.