Why Alberta?
Energy resources, industrial corridors, land, a cold climate, fibre, an AI research base, a legal route to build your own power plant, and a provincial strategy that went looking for this investment on purpose.
Height means What a dedicated power plant can produce
Marker positions are approximate. Bar height encodes only the selected metric; a project that has not published that metric shows a dashed stub reading NOT DISCLOSED rather than dropping to zero.
How much power is this?
We are not going to add every announcement into one future number. Instead, here is the system-level evidence, and here are the individual projects — with their metric labels intact.
The rules changed because the scale changed.
- Alberta AI Data Centres Strategy The province set out to attract this investment: power capacity, sustainable cooling, economic growth. Government of Alberta ↗
- AESO interim large-load approach An interim Phase 1 connection limit of 1,200 MW while longer-term arrangements are developed. Alberta Electric System Operator ↗
- Bill 8 — Utilities Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 A "bring your own generation" pathway, and the cost-causation question of who pays for upgrades. Government of Alberta ↗
- Data Centre Regulation 117/2026 Rules written specifically for this industry. Government of Alberta — Open Government ↗
- Data-centre levy A tax instrument aimed at this specific kind of load. Government of Alberta ↗
This is where AI becomes politics. The rules change what physically gets built.
Cumulative-impact laboratory
Nobody knows how much of this pipeline becomes real. So model it, and label the model honestly.
Only what is already under construction proceeds. Everything still in a regulatory process or at the proposal stage does not get built.
- Meta Sturgeon Data Centre
Electricity the computers actually pull. This is the demand.
No published figure Meta Sturgeon Data Centre — counted as unknown, not as zero.
The most a power plant can produce. This is the supply.
Permission to draw from the shared grid. This is a queue position.
Only runs in an emergency. Almost never producing.
No published figure Meta Sturgeon Data Centre — counted as unknown, not as zero.
The four bars above must never be added to each other. A generation capacity, a data-centre load, a grid allocation and a backup rating are four different physical quantities that happen to share a unit.
- New electricity demand More sites means more demand, whether it is served by the grid or by dedicated plants.
- Dedicated generation Most Alberta proposals in this data set include building new gas-fired generation.
- Grid connection pressure Behind-the-meter projects add demand without adding to the connection queue. That relieves the queue and removes the project from shared system planning at the same time.
- Natural-gas demand Follows directly from gas-fired generation, and brings upstream methane questions with it.
- Operational emissions Depends on generation technology, carbon capture, and how much of the load is served by non-emitting supply. No project in this data set publishes an annual emissions figure.
- Land Campus land, not building footprint. Only Meta publishes an acreage in this data set.
- Construction activity Concentrated, temporary, and the phase host communities actually experience first.
- Permanent jobs Rises, but far less than investment does. Meta lists 300 permanent jobs against $13B.
- Tax, levy and royalty potential Alberta has introduced a data-centre levy. The realised amount depends on rules that are still being written.
- Water Almost entirely a function of cooling design. A dry closed-loop campus and an evaporative campus of the same size have completely different water footprints.
- Transmission infrastructure Grid-connected projects drive new lines and substations. Who pays for them is the cost-causation question.
No numbers are attached to these indicators, because attaching numbers would be false precision. The direction is defensible. A decimal place would not be.
Beacon Indus, Rocky View County
About three kilometres east of Calgary. A proposed 1,494 MW power project, of which roughly 1,200 MW would supply co-located AI/HPC data halls under normal operation.
This is not a future debate. Re-check the AUC proceeding page on the morning of the talk — hearing dates and status change.