$1.3 billion in revenue, growing on av- erage by about eight percent per year, lawyers with Calgary-based McMillan LLP wrote in July. “Alberta has a long history of building complex, multi-billion-dollar infrastruc-
ture projects with success, and AI data centres could be the next area of focus for this core competency,” McMillan’s Business Law Bulletin reported. In recent years, companies such as Am- azon and RBC have negotiated pow-
er purchase agreements for renewable energy to power local operations and data centres, while supporting the con- struction of some of the country’s larg- est renewable energy projects, McMil- lan noted
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI-driven data centre energy boom ‘ open for business ’ in Alberta by Deborah Jaremko & Will Gibson
like data centres can build the pow- er supply they need by entering proj- ect agreements directly with electricity producers instead of relying solely on the power of the existing grid.
Data centres – the industrial-scale technology complexes powering the world’s growing boom in artificial in - telligence – require reliable, continu- ous energy. And a lot of it. “Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing in en- ergy, dominating discussions at all levels in companies, banks, investment funds and governments,” says Simon Flow- ers, chief analyst with energy consul- tancy Wood Mackenzie. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that the power required globally by data centres could double in the next 18 months. It’s not surpris- ing given a search query using AI con- sumes up to 10 times the energy as a regular search engine.
The IEA estimates more than 8,000 data centres now operate around the world, with about one-third located in the United States. About 300 centres operate in Canada. It’s a growing opportunity in Alber- ta, where unlike anywhere else in the country, data centre operators can move more swiftly by “bringing their own power.”
Between 2018 and 2023, data centres in Alberta generated approximately
“ Alberta has a long history of building complex, multi-billion- dollar infrastructure projects with success, and AI data centres could be the next area of focus for this core competency, ”
“ Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing in energy, dominating discussions at all levels in companies, banks, investment funds and governments ”
In Alberta’s deregulated electrici- ty market, large energy consumers
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