CALGARY—Big Tech turned to Alberta when it needed renewable energy to offset its carbon emissions. Now, the province wants to harness its massive natural gas sector to feed an even greater appetite: Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence boom.  

Nate Glubish, Alberta’s innovation minister, has visited California three times in as many months to meet with the biggest players in U.S. tech—Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce and Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaking giant Nvidia—and promote the province as an energy source to power their massive AI data centres. 

So far, those and other companies are contemplating building computing hubs in the province that would use thousands of megawatts of power and require billions worth of investment, Glubish said in an interview with The Logic, following his latest Silicon Valley trip in late September. 

The province’s California outreach comes as the AI race sends U.S. tech companies scrambling to secure the huge amounts of electricity required to fuel the power-hungry hardware driving AI. With America’s biggest companies dedicated to developing AI, access to energy has now become the sector’s primary bottleneck, according to some analyses. 

“Every one of these major technology companies—all of the biggest technology companies in the world—their single biggest need right now is to build thousands and thousands of megawatts of data-centre infrastructure, and they need it right now. They’re desperate for this,” Glubish said. 

Given its abundance of cheap energy, Alberta is well-placed to power AI data centres, the minister said, while companies will have access to a “fibre-optic backbone” that can transport data to markets in the U.S. or Canada.

“The argument we’re making is Alberta can definitely help you overcome this bottleneck,” he said. 

While U.S. tech firms would prefer to power their data centres using renewables, Glubish said, his discussions with them suggest they’re resigned to using dirtier sources—at least in the short term—to remain competitive with their peers. 

“They know they can’t run their data centres on renewables,” he said. 

Tech companies appear to have acknowledged as much, and are seeking other emissions-free power sources in an effort to keep a lid on their environmental footprints. Google aims to tap geothermal power in Nevada, and nuclear energy in South Carolina. Microsoft and Amazon are also involved in the South Carolina deal, while Meta has inked its own geothermal supply contracts. 

No surprise, then, that nearly all of North America’s thermal, hydro and nuclear power is either spoken for or years away from developing, as evidenced by Microsoft’s years-long plan to revive a shuttered nuclear facility in Pennsylvania to power its AI needs. 

That leaves natural gas, Glubish said, which he claims Alberta can provide more cheaply than many U.S. competitors. The province has a well-established network of pipelines and power facilities, and access to the Montney formation, a vast pool of gas in northern B.C. and Alberta. 

“These guys are practical, realistic business people,” he said. “They understand that over the next five years, they have to build this infrastructure and turn it on.”

Jorden Dye, the head of the Calgary-based Business Renewables Centre-Canada, said Alberta is unable to meet those data-centre power demands using wind and solar power, because it lacks the battery-storage capacity necessary to save up the intermittent energy output. But far from being a distant aspiration, Dye adds, such capacity has already been installed in places like Texas and California.

“We’ve seen other jurisdictions that have actually built out their grid-scale battery storage.”

Glubish said companies could use carbon capture and storage to cut emissions, and then tap into Alberta’s hydrogen or renewable energy potential in the future, when complementary technologies like battery storage become commercially feasible. 

Tech companies including Microsoft, Shopify and Amazon have already financed several wind and solar projects in Alberta, in the form of power purchase agreements to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. 

Big Tech and heavy emitters have signed at least 33 such contracts in the last five years, according to The Logic’s analysis, partly as a result of the unregulated structure of Alberta’s power grid, which lets private companies buy power directly from suppliers. 

Whether Silicon Valley will opt for Alberta electricity remains unclear, particularly at a time when the U.S., China and other countries are trying to keep next-generation technology—like computer chips and advanced manufacturing—within their own borders. 

Glubish, for his part, figures cheap energy and pre-existing fibre-optics will go a long way in convincing them, adding the province is currently reviewing and assisting on several “very credible leads” for data-centre projects, totalling around 10,000 megawatts of capacity. As a rule of thumb, every 1,000 megawatts of data centre capacity costs as much as $12 billion to build, he said. By way of comparison, B.C.’s massive Site C dam that is nearing completion has a 1,100 megawatt capacity. 

Glubish wouldn’t specify those new developments, but said companies are assessing potential sites and identifying partners to help with engineering and power sourcing.