Alberta is putting itself in the race for a slice of the soaring growth of data centres in North America and around the world. The province has a unique offering, but also challenges — including questions about how much pollution its natural gas-dominated electricity grid produces now and into the future.
Artificial intelligence is on the rise and there is a need for massive data centres — the physical buildings that store digital information. They require a huge amount of electricity, something tech companies are scouring the world to find. Alberta is putting itself in the race for a slice of the soaring growth of data centres in North America.
The opportunity is immense and the province has a unique offering, but there are also questions about what the overall impact will be of constructing the electricity-hungry centres required for the booming artificial intelligence sector. "You really need to get an understanding of what the return on investment would be for the province," he said. "That's why we're digging into it."Currently, the majority of data centres in Canada are located in Ontario and Quebec because of the large population of the two provinces, experts say. Quebec's low-cost renewable electricity, primarily fromdata centres driven from two sources: cloud service providers and artificial intelligence companies.
"There's an arms race of growth," said Belenkie, whose company recently signed a deal with a company to power a new data centre with a natural gas power plant and a carbon capture facility, which means the emissions would be collected and stored underground. "Importing the demand to make use of the trapped energy is a really elegant solution for us in Alberta," he said.
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