Alberta has finally landed its first whale in the quest to draw $100 billion of data centre investment into the province — a new campus to be built by Meta Platforms.

But the story behind the story dates back years, and the groundwork assembled during this period should help pave the way for more developments to arrive in Alberta.

Varcoe: The years-long quest — and future road map — to bringing data centres to Alberta Back to video

The opportunity of bringing data centre investment to Alberta has its genesis in November 2021, after giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it would create a cloud computing hub and build three data centres in the Calgary area.

The announcement gained widespread attention within the province. It also raised the possibility that larger, more energy-intense centres needed for artificial intelligence development could eventually be built here.

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“When AWS originally landed in Alberta, we developed a great relationship over time and they were the ones that flagged for us that the industry was going to be facing huge demand on this AI-compute product,” recalled Rick Christiaanse, former CEO of Invest Alberta, the Crown corporation that seeks to attract new investment into the province.

“The industry was going to have to build triple the amount of data centres that they had already built by that time, and there was going to........

© Calgary Herald