ALL ISSUES  |  ISSUE 04

AI and Alberta's resources: Who benefits?

By Kena Shah

Originally published on April 19, 2026 in issue 04 of Forward Weekly

Led by Minister of Technology and Innovation Nate Glubish, the provincial government’s data centre strategy hopes to attract $100 billion in investment by advertising Alberta as the perfect home for data centres. Published in December 2024, the report pitches the province as a source for everything AI companies need to power their products — cheap energy, cold weather, water infrastructure and low taxes.

The pitch appears to be working. In the first half of 2025 alone, there was such an unprecedented level of project connection requests that the Alberta Electric System Operator, which runs and plans the province’s electricity system, imposed a temporary limit on new large-load connections while it figured out how to accommodate data-centre demand. The reason, it said was simple: approving every request risked impairing grid reliability.

Reliable electricity isn’t the only thing that could be strained. Land is one of the first tradeoffs. Data centres need a lot of it: in 2024, the average data centre site spanned 224 acres — and, in order to cool their servers, they use water. A typical data centre uses water equivalent to that of 1,000 households, while a larger data centre guzzles volumes equal to the needs of a town with 50,000 residents.

It’s clear what Alberta has to offer tech companies keen to build more data centres. What’s less clear is what Albertans will realistically get in return.

While the Alberta government has touted the province’s cold, dry climate as a benefit that could reduce the amount of water used to keep data centres cool, three quarters of Alberta’s proposed data centre campuses are in regions already under high or extremely high water stress. And local communities are speaking out, rejecting proposed projects that would affect their towns. In 2025, Rocky View County turned down a proposal to build a data centre on farmland and for obvious reasons: the data centre would draw potable water from the county’s supply. Farmers were also concerned with whether a data centre could take precedence in case of drought — an issue Alberta is already struggling with.

It’s clear what Alberta has to offer tech companies keen to build more data centres. What’s less clear is what Albertans will realistically get in return.

Many tech companies, and the politicians backing them, would have us believe that the public gain is job creation. They have extolled the abundance of careers that await Albertans. “That's where the home run comes in, in terms of increased investment, increased jobs and increased economic activity,” Glubish told the CBC in 2024. But a closer look suggests most of these jobs are fleeting.

Per an update from Rocky View County’s councillor Kevin Hanson, two projects are set to employ 1,500 and 1,200 construction workers, but only 400 and 200 permanent jobs respectively. One data centre that has already been approved in Red Deer, and is under construction, will employ only five to seven people.

Not only do data centre companies know these jobs are temporary, they’re designing for their impermanence. In Texas, for example, a one-million-square-foot data centre that promised 1,500 jobs is being constructed with permanent parking stalls for fewer than 10 per cent of those workers in the long term. In contrast, the construction of an approximately 300,000-square-foot cheese packing plant in the same location could have employed 500 full-time people.

Beacon AI Centers, a company building a data centre in the Calgary and Rocky View County region, has claimed that their project will create up to 4500 construction jobs. But less than 7 per cent of those would become permanent jobs.

Data centres clearly aren't living up to the employment hype. While Glubish initially mentioned increased investment, jobs and economic activity as the "home run" for data centre development, this argument appears weaker under scrutiny, so the sales pitch has evolved. Now the promise is digital sovereignty. As reported by BetaKit, Glubish argued at a March 2026 forum in Calgary that housing Canadian data in centres within American jurisdiction leaves us vulnerable to U.S. authorities, hence the push for data centre development in Alberta.

Not only do data centre companies know these jobs are temporary, they’re designing for their impermanence.

But many of the projects proposed for Alberta are built by American companies — Beacon AI’s founder is based in New York, Crusoe AI is based in Denver — and thus subject to U.S. orders. For example, the CLOUD Act allows U.S. law enforcement to compel American companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta to provide data regardless of whether the data is stored in the U.S. or in foreign-owned data centres. Simply having data centres physically located in Canada doesn’t prevent threats to Canadians’ data. The lack of both supposed job creation and Canadian data sovereignty makes the reasoning behind data centre development in Alberta unclear.

With the public case for jobs and data sovereignty running thin, the alternative explanation is that data centres create a new thirst for Alberta gas at a moment when producers need it. Demand for natural gas has slumped in Alberta, per the Calgary Herald, but data centres — which would be powered by natural gas in Alberta — would help revive that demand. “It is really a story about bringing incremental gas demand to the province and also supporting (it) with new generation for some of the large industrial load that we’re seeing come to the province as well,” Pembina Pipeline's senior executive told the Herald last year. Pembina is the natural gas supplier to Kineticor’s Greenlight project near Edmonton.

Despite waning demand, Alberta’s oil and gas production is at a record high. Since 2011, the number of barrels of oil produced in the province has multiplied 11-fold to 1.4 billion. But that growth hasn’t translated to employment. Just last year, the industry cut 10,000 jobs. Improved automation means that the industry can do more with fewer workers. To that end, Imperial Oil is set to cut 20 percent of its workforce by the end of 2027. Both Imperial and Suncor are leveraging technology, such as self-driving trucks, remote piloted drones, AI sensors and even a robot dog for site inspections and maintenance.

Some have celebrated data centres as the second coming of Alberta’s oil patch, and certainly U.S. tech companies stand to benefit from what the province has to offer — not to mention U.S. oil companies (about 70 per cent of Imperial Oil is owned by American oil giant ExxonMobil; Suncor’s largest shareholders include American investment managers like Vanguard). But what does the province stand to gain? Data centre developers have made a persuasive case for why they should build in Alberta. What remains in question is why Albertans should subsidize the bargain with their land, water, energy and public trust.