The future is
not artificial.
AI feels like software. At scale, AI is also land, electricity, fibre, steel, concrete, chips, cooling, water systems, power plants and public policy.
Alberta wants to become a major AI infrastructure hub. This is an interactive documentary about what that physically means — and it ends with you writing the rules.
The answer
A few hundred words on a screen
Campus
Several buildings, a substation, and a lot of ground.
Turn it on.
Everything is built. Nothing is running. Nothing is warm.
- Electrical power
- Computation
- Heat
- Cooling system
- Outdoor heat rejection
Every mark is a rack the size of a fridge, drawing as much power as several dozen homes.
Why Alberta?
This is not hypothetical. Alberta has deliberately positioned itself as a destination for AI data-centre investment. Here is what proponents say makes it attractive.
- Energy resources Abundant natural gas, and a deregulated electricity market that lets private developers build generation.
- Industrial corridors Places like the Industrial Heartland already have heavy power, roads and permitting experience.
- Land Large parcels, available, and cheap by global standards.
- Cold climate Cold air is free cooling. Alberta winters are a genuine engineering asset.
- Fibre & connectivity Existing routes, with room to build more.
- Technology ecosystem Alberta has spent years building an AI research base.
- Bring your own generation A legal pathway to build your own power plant rather than wait in the grid queue.
- Provincial strategy The province has explicitly set out to attract this investment.
The honest answer is that nobody can add it up.
It is tempting to total every Alberta announcement and produce one enormous future number. We are not going to, and here is why.
- Many of these are proposals. Some will not be built.
- Some may overlap — the same load can appear in two announcements.
- They publish different metrics. Load, generation and allocation are not the same quantity.
- Projects change size between announcement and operation.
The rules changed because
the scale changed.
projects · sought
A grid built over decades for steel mills, cities and oil sands received, in a single year, requests on a scale it had never seen.
Four numbers. Four different meanings.
A giant AI data centre must need huge cooling towers consuming enormous amounts of local water. Right?
What if more than one of them gets built?
Nobody knows how much of this pipeline becomes real. So instead of predicting, we are going to model — and label the model honestly.
Alberta wants AI infrastructure.
You write the rules.
You are now the Alberta AI Infrastructure Commission. Any project that wants to build here has to meet your conditions.
The question was never "do you support this company". It is: what would you require of anyone who builds this, whoever they are.
Now live
with them.
Rules are easy to write and expensive to keep. Here is what each of yours actually costs.
Alberta → Canada → the world.
How much electricity does it take to answer this question?
That depends on the model, the length of the answer, and the hardware it runs on…