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Alberta Wants Data Centres. Residents Are Fighting Back

Communities fear being sold out in the AI gold rush

Benjamin Baril learned about Meta’s planned 2.9-million-square-foot AI data centre, ironically enough, on Facebook. In April 2025, Sturgeon County council had quietly held an afternoon public hearing to approve data centres as a permitted land use within its sprawling industrial zone, about thirty-five kilometres northeast of Edmonton. But for twenty-year-old Baril, this was the first he’d heard of it.

Alberta accounts for 90 percent of AI data centre development in Canada

The province also has a high number of data centre opponents, citing environmental, zoning, and energy concerns

While the federal government unveiled guidelines for development, critics argue there’s little regulatory framework for AI

He wasn’t alone. Scanning through various community groups on Facebook, Baril noticed “a lot of people who were very unhappy with it,” he recalled. “It didn’t really seem like anyone was organizing any kind of action against it,” so he took it upon himself. Baril helped stage an August 2 rally outside the Sturgeon County Centre in Morinville that drew nearly 200 people. “From there, it just kind of snowballed,” he explained. Baril made connections with other data centre opponents across the province, who had connected with yet others across Canada and the United States. He organized another protest on October 3, one of at least five held that day across the two countries, he said.

Data centres have existed for decades in Canada, with little outcry. They power the internet, streaming, cloud-computing services, and, more recently, cryptocurrency mining. According to Alberta Data Centre Watch, there are twenty operating in Calgary, Edmonton, and Lethbridge, as well as smaller towns, such as Medicine Hat and Drumheller.

What’s changed in recent years is the proliferation of massive, so-called hyperscale structures to serve AI. Floor space for the Meta data centre, for example, would be more than half the size of West Edmonton Mall. That such facilities can require a gigawatt of electricity—roughly the output of a nuclear reactor—has raised concerns about higher power rates and increased carbon emissions. But their hunger for energy is maybe the least of what makes data centres so controversial. They are noisy, producing an incessant high-pitched whine (which some have described as a clogged vacuum), causing headaches and disrupting sleep. They throw off enormous amounts of waste heat, raising surrounding temperatures to create “heat islands.” Building them can flatten hundreds of acres of farmland, making that land permanently useless for growing crops.

None of this has stopped Alberta from going all in. Instead, hyperscale data centres are a centrepiece of Premier Danielle Smith’s plans to double oil and gas production by 2035. The logic is straightforward: AI needs staggering amounts of electricity, and Alberta wants to burn its abundant natural gas to provide it. Her government pitches these projects as “digital” refineries, built by some of the same companies Smith once castigated as a “cabal of Tech Giants.”

Alberta accounts for 90 percent of all such development proposed in Canada, with 12.6 gigawatts of data centre capacity in the works (enough electricity to power 9.45 million homes). It’s also the province where resistance is the most intense. An online Leger survey of 1,505 Canadians from July 2026 found that 31 percent of respondents in Alberta were strongly opposed to data centre development in their province—the highest rate in the country.

This opposition, alongside broader anxieties about AI’s penetration into increasing facets of our daily lives and the empowerment of unaccountable tech oligarchs, has resulted in the formation of some unlikely coalitions. Attendees of the Morinville rally organized by Baril ranged from hardcore environmentalists to Alberta separatists. “It’s an issue that’s really easy to rally people around,” said Baril, “but also an issue that showcases the apathy of our political class in Alberta towards public sentiment and the people that they represent.”

Canada is a relative latecomer to the data centre boom. The US, home to the world’s largest AI companies, had a considerable head start on the buildout. But Canada has become increasingly attractive because its colder climate means less energy is needed to prevent the vast banks of servers from overheating. Alberta’s low temperatures and abundant natural gas were explicitly cited as reasons celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary decided to erect a $70 billion,........

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