When Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation went to court recently to challenge Alberta’s handling of the proposed Wonder Valley AI Data Centre Park project, the dispute underscored a question that is increasingly difficult to ignore: What does Canada’s artificial intelligence future require from land, water and energy systems?

Wonder Valley, which would be located south of Grande Prairie, has been advertised as the world’s largest AI data centre park. Alberta’s major projects listing describes its first phase as a 1.4-gigawatt off-grid power system leveraging the provincial natural gas and geothermal resources.

The project is only one example of a broader trend. The federal government’s new “AI for All” strategy links AI to economic growth, jobs and national competitiveness. The strategy also points to expanding “sovereign compute” and supporting the construction of large-scale AI data centres.

Read more: Sovereign AI? Anthropic shutdown reveals Canada’s weakness

AI is resource-dependent

These ambitions make the environmental debates significant. AI is often described as if it lives in “the cloud.” The persistent controversies regarding Wonder Valley illustrate the fallacy of this metaphor.

Artificial intelligence relies on material resources: land, electricity, water, cooling systems, transmission lines, gas infrastructure, minerals and servers. When those demands become concentrated in one place, AI becomes an environmental and energy issue.

My research focuses on environmental communication, including the........

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