When Alberta technology and innovation minister Nate Glubish attended a conference in California two years ago featuring some of the world’s top AI leaders, the topic of conversation wasn’t familiar to him: the coming boom in data centre construction over the next decade.
“It’s not, ‘we’re going to build it Canadian for the sake of,’ it’s, ‘what does this allow us to do as Canadians?’”
MP Corey Hogan
Executives described the scale of investment that was coming. Anthropic representatives said the company had spent $1 billion on AI compute the previous year, planned to spend $10 billion that year, and then another $100 billion the next. Microsoft, meanwhile, was planning to spend $200 billion.
Glubish asked what obstacles were in the way.
“It was very clear,” he said on Wednesday. “Access to reliable electricity at scale, and speed to market. And as I pressed further, I learned that, really, Alberta has everything these folks need.”
Glubish made the remarks in his keynote speech for the Digital Innovation Forum 2026 in Calgary. The event, hosted by the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada (PTAC), brought together energy companies, tech firms, developers, and policymakers to talk about how Alberta’s natural gas and power infrastructure can support rapid expansion, as global demand for data centre capacity is expected to triple by 2030.
Alberta is in the midst of a serious push to attract data centre investment, courting major players like Meta. Last October, Premier Danielle Smith expanded her ministerial team to attract data centres to the province through Alberta’s data centre strategy.
The province put the strategy forward in December 2024, looking to attract $100 billion of investment in AI data centres by pushing Alberta as a cheap source of abundant natural gas, a reduced-regulation environment for infrastructure projects, a cold climate for easy cooling, and a comparatively low-tax space for companies.
Large-scale data centres powering AI models require enormous amounts of electricity, and generating enough is going to be a hurdle, Glubish told PTAC president and CEO Lauren Savoie during a fireside chat session following his keynote.
According to the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), a provincial arm’s-length agency that helps oversee electricity, demand for proposed data centres reached 20.7 gigawatts in the third quarter of 2025, which is nearly double the agency’s all-time peak of 12.3 gigawatts. As a result, any large-scale development will need to include power generation.
“What that means is, either on your own, or with a partner, plan to build your own natural gas power generation, on-site, to power your data centre,” Glubish said. “You do that, we will work with you to make it super easy, super simple, super fast. And if you need help, we’ll connect you to the gas providers, we’ll connect you to the fire providers, we’ll help you navigate the water licences.”
Large-scale data centres would create thousands of jobs during the construction phase and a “smaller number” once operational, said Glubish, but the real “home run” would come from digital sovereignty.
He argued Canadian AI companies often have little choice but to train models on US-based infrastructure, placing proprietary data and intellectual property under American jurisdiction.
Without domestic compute infrastructure, Canadian AI companies risk losing control over sensitive information while trying to compete globally, as US authorities could compel technology firms to provide access to data stored on their systems.
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“This is a serious problem,” he said. “If we want to overcome that and compete, we need to be building the next $100, $200, $500 billion, $1 trillion tech companies in Canada,” he said.
“The only way to do that is with sovereign computers. That is why this is so important.”
Calgary MP Corey Hogan, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Canada, echoed those comments in his own keynote address.
“It means we think about what it means for net benefit for Canadians, because that ultimately is kind of the purpose of the sovereignty,” he said. “So, we’ve got to keep that goal in mind, too. It’s not, ‘we’re going to build it Canadian for the sake of,’ it’s, ‘what does this allow us to do as Canadians?’”
There are a number of smaller data centres operating in Alberta, and a handful of large-scale proposals are in the works, including the $70-billion Wonder Valley Data Centre Project in the MD of Greenview in northern Alberta, and the $10-billion Synapse Data Centre near the town of Olds in southern Alberta.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Alberta Newsroom.