A data center project in Alberta that’s backed by European firms has the potential to be worth as much as €8 billion ($9.4 billion) over the next several years, says the head of one of the companies involved.
Data District, a division of Swiss-based manager Alcral AG, has partnered with Technologies New Energy Plc, or TNE, on a proposal for multiple data centers in the western Canadian province. The €780 million first phase, announced in December, begins with a site in Olds, about an hour’s drive north of Calgary.
But the longer-term blueprint envisions a much larger investment, with the group eventually building 1 gigawatt of data center capacity, said Carlos Caldas, Data District’s chief executive officer.
Alberta, the heartland of Canada’s energy industry, is pitching itself as an attractive place for artificial intelligence-capable computing power because of its vast, cheap reserves of natural gas.
Data District and TNE were “considering Texas for our North American roadmap but we decided to allocate most of our resources to Alberta instead,” Caldas said in an email. “We were very impressed with the province’s approach to business and data centers in specific.”
If fully built, the data center investment would be one of the largest current projects in the province. The first phase involves data centers and will be funded by Alcral and a UK firm, according to Caldas, who said the project received interest from Asian sovereign investors.
The announcement came about a month after Danielle Smith, Alberta’s conservative premier, signed a memorandum of understanding with Prime Minister Mark Carney that would pave the way for a range of energy-related projects.
The federal government pledged to lift clean electricity rules and emissions limits that Alberta said hinder its energy industry. In exchange, Alberta pledged to raise its industrial carbon price and shore up the province’s carbon trading system. As part of the agreement, the federal government said it will support the construction of a new oil pipeline as well as carbon capture projects and data centers.
“I think Alberta has that advantage where there is gas and it’s their own gas, and they are encouraging now the use of that gas for data centers,” Julio Perez, TNE’s chief executive officer, said in an interview.
The Data District project will generate 80% of its own power from natural gas and rely on the grid for 20%, Perez said. The partial reliance on the grid will probably expose the company to a planned hardware tax that the province plans to impose.
While the data-center project hasn’t secured customers yet, there’s enough demand for computing capacity to attract multiple clients, said Perez, whose company is based in Porto, Portugal. “There was no prerequisite to see a signed occupancy or usage agreement with anyone. The funding is already there.”
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