GREENVIEW, Alta. — At Wonder Valley, the giant data centre in northwestern Alberta backed by flamboyant investor Kevin O’Leary, the wonder is behind schedule.

Announced as all but a sure thing in December 2024, construction was supposed to begin by 2026 with a first phase operating by 2027.

Then would come relentless growth. In a vacant lot of publicly owned land 700 kilometres northwest of Calgary would rise the world’s largest data centre powered, in part, by the vast reserves of natural gas that sit under the Grande Prairie region. Once complete, Wonder Valley would, its backers boasted, produce 7.5 gigawatts of computing power—about two-thirds of what the whole of Alberta’s power grid uses in the middle of a typical day. 

Locally, the project could be transformative. It would create thousands of construction jobs, with hundreds more long-term jobs to keep the computers running and the power flowing. It could also put the region on the map as a destination for more data centres and high-tech industry.

For now, the site remains fallow. A highway turnoff and a short length of road lead to dirt tracks, stands of trees and burned slash piles in open areas where trees used to be. It’s less a valley than a wide, gentle slope, home to a pack of coyotes.

The hope is that construction might start in late 2028, says Kyle Reiling, the executive director of industrial development for the Greenview Municipal District, Wonder Valley’s intended host. Greenview covers thousands of square kilometres south and east of the industrial city of Grande Prairie itself.

The region is built on gas. It’s squarely atop the Montney Formation, a gigantic pool of hydrocarbons under Alberta and British Columbia that supplies current and planned gas export terminals on the B.C. coast. Oil and gas are typically found together but the proportions vary, and what oil is to northeastern Alberta, gas is to the northwest. Stab an icepick into the ground here and you might get yourself a hissing little well.

In Grande Prairie itself, the many hotels lining the highways in and out indicate its position as a hitching post for workers and travellers. At 100 Street and 100 Avenue—the origin point of the street grid and the heart of Grande Prairie’s one-tower downtown—a road sign points the way to Alaska.

Much of the city is surrounded by the neat checkerboards of prairie farming, studded with occasional pumpjacks and sproutings of pipes. To the south, on land mostly governed by Greenview, the land is more rugged and forested. This is the Gold Creek area, a particularly resource-rich part of the Montney Formation where oil and gas companies, including Shell, are extracting fossil fuels and looking for more.

Running off the few highways are rough roads for loggers and workers servicing the wells that are more numerous in the forest than on the flatland. From above, the network looks like a haphazard circuit board.

Reiling has been working on Wonder Valley for years, though he didn’t know that would be the case in 2021 when he started preparing its prospective site, a public property now branded the Greenview Industrial Gateway, for heavy industry. The GIG, as locals call it, has highway and rail access, a power line and even a river to draw water from. It’s an 800-hectare socket in the middle of that circuit board landscape, waiting for something to plug into it.

Multiple plans, none as ambitious as Wonder Valley, have failed here before, but the municipality has a lot to show for its efforts. “We’ve spent over $70 million to date on the development of this infrastructure,” Reiling says. “So when you hear Kevin O’Leary say that he found a unicorn—yeah, he found a unicorn, but it didn’t just happen.”

Tens of millions of public dollars have gone into upgrading the highway connecting the GIG to Grande Prairie, about half an hour’s drive away. Highway 40 has a turnoff into the GIG now, leading to a newly paved road that leads, for the moment, to nowhere. “I have a water design, I have a built road… We’ve completed the wetlands assessment, the biophysical assessment,” Reiling says.

Yet O’Leary Ventures has yet to finalize the purchase of the municipal land and has not, as far as Reiling knows, applied for any new provincial permits it might need, nor started formal consultations with Indigenous communities. The firm did not not respond to multiple requests for interviews or written updates about the project.

Reeve Ryan Ratzlaff, the leader of Greenview’s municipal council, remains optimistic. Once O’Leary Ventures realized how big the opportunity was, Ratzlaff believes, it decided to slow things down.

“They just started moving a little bit slower to make sure that they had everything as perfect as they could get it,” he says, sitting by the wood stove in his repair shop, known as the Ratz Nest.

A former mechanic for pipeline company Pembina whose dad drove a grader for the municipality, Ratzlaff is in his second term on Greenview’s council. His shop is on the property where he lives near the hamlet of Little Smoky. The mounted skull of a moose—bagged a mile and a half away, Ratzlaff says—looks over a partially deconstructed car, workbenches, and innumerable parts and stacks of supplies. Final approvals and construction for Wonder Valley are getting closer by the day, he says.

Data-centre experts say time is of the essence. Tech giants are rushing to secure the compute capacity they’ll need to train and run models and applications over the next three or four years—a period when the field’s leading lights promise AI will change how everything in the economy and society works.

When Wonder Valley was announced, Nate Glubish, Alberta’s minister of technology, said his ministry had been working with O’Leary Ventures “for several months” to help navigate Alberta’s regulatory system. “Projects like these don’t happen by accident,” Glubish wrote in an op-ed in The Sherwood Park-Strathcona County News, his constituency newspaper.

A year on, when asked for an update from the provincial government’s perspective, a spokesperson said Glubish would rather just talk about Alberta’s strategy for attracting data centres in general.

People closer to Wonder Valley geographically, but removed from the hype, say they’re eager for it to happen and ready to help—as Greenview’s efforts continue. “Being a part of this, supporting where possible, is something we’re very happy to do, and we’ll continue to support them as this project and other projects go down the road,” says Grande Prairie Mayor Jackie Clayton.

Vanessa Sheane, president of Grande Prairie’s Northwestern Polytechnic, says her school is “keen and ready to do what we need to do to make sure they have the workforce and skilled labour that they need” to build and staff Wonder Valley, but hasn’t yet spun up any new programs.

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Before Wonder Valley there were others. Greenview’s decade-plus dream has been to create its own version of an area called Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, the complex of petrochemical factories and oil refineries north and east of Edmonton. Reiling used to work in economic development in Strathcona and Sturgeon counties, both of which have stakes in the Heartland. 

Proponents want the Grande Prairie region to process its own gas into more expensive products—but getting interest from companies willing to make the investment has been a challenge.

Ratzlaff laments the pattern. “We’ve seen so much of that—[companies] have looked at our area, and then I think a lot of them ended up going to the Heartland, right?” The council’s dream, he adds, is to get some of the Heartland money up north.

The natural gas in the Montney Formation is abundant but not all of it is worth extracting. Sometimes the geology is unfavourable or the flow is poor or there are too many contaminants mixed in with the good stuff.

“Depending on the location, it might not be viable to pipe all of that into a larger plant and get it into the Trans Canada pipeline,” says Ratzlaff. But a local buyer for the gas from marginal wells? That changes the economics. 

The GIG is Greenview’s attempt to present major industrial players with a site where much of the hard work is already done for them. It’s almost worked several times, producing announcements that are just as sure in their tones as Wonder Valley’s.

In 2021, Northern Petrochemical Corporation proposed a plant to turn natural gas into methanol and ammonia, bringing 400 long-term jobs. In April 2022, Cerilon GTL announced it would build a facility to turn natural gas into diesel, jet fuel, wax and other specialty petrochemical products, bringing 280 long-term jobs. In January 2024, Interprovincial Fuel Solutions announced plans for a plant to produce synthetic gasoline and hydrogen, with 50 to 70 full-time jobs.

All these projects have fizzled. Each is its own story—failing amid uncertainty about whether the rail line was suitable for ammonia transportation, a lack of carbon-capture infrastructure, the list goes on. Collectively, they show how difficult it is to do large-scale projects, Reiling says—though he remains optimistic.

Wonder Valley’s plan is to use all that local natural gas as a cheap power source for a gargantuan data centre, buttressed by geothermal energy. Instead of processing gas into another physical product, Wonder Valley plans to turn it into high-value bits that can be shipped out on fibre-optics, not tanker cars.

That’s even more appealing than a petrochemical refiner, says Ratzlaff, which would spread huge plains of black gravel on the landscape. A data centre, by comparison, would have less of an impact. “The O’Leary group wants to fit their buildings in here and there and try and keep as much of the natural landscape as they can,” he says. “To me, that’s a massive win.”

Wonder Valley would also be a signal to others, says Jon Anderson, who this month completed a one-year stint as chair of the Grande Prairie regional chamber of commerce. A former director at ATB Financial, where he spent more than 30 years, he’s now an executive coach. “Wonder Valley is the first domino,” he says. “If we can get this to fall, we now have something to strengthen our economic development story. We know what we have to offer. We’re inviting the world to come see our region.” He concedes, though, that everyone will breathe easier when there’s a shovel in the ground.

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Wonder Valley isn’t Kevin O’Leary’s attempt to launch a cloud provider to rival Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Oracle. Instead, the proposed data centre would be rented out to one or more of those so-called hyperscalers. Even if Wonder Valley gets built, though, Big Tech might not come.

Microsoft doesn’t have a major data centre in the west, which makes Alberta “a logical place to look to expand capacity,” says Microsoft Canada president Matt Milton. Wonder Valley, though, isn’t really in its thinking as it invests billions in expanding its own facilities: “We’re not part of the discussions right now.”

While tech giants have the money and expertise to put up their own AI compute infrastructure, they’re turning to external data centre operators for two things: pace and power, “The need for new capacity is very urgent—it needs to be procured now,” says Tania Tsoneva, head of infrastructure research at CBRE Investment Management. Working with firms that have already secured land and energy lets the hyperscalers speed up the launch of new compute capacity, since all they have to do is bring in their hardware. 

That doesn’t mean, however, that any data centre will do. Tech giants want operators that have a lot of technical expertise and long track records, according to Tsoneva, who hadn’t heard of Wonder Valley until a reporter from The Logic asked about it. The chips and hardware that go into an AI data centre are expensive, she says. “You’re not just going to give them to just about anybody.” 

O’Leary Ventures will need to raise a lot of money to fund its buildout in Greenview. Data centres are much easier and cheaper to finance when they already have long-term contracts with tech giants, Tsoneva says. “The tenant is very, very, very important.” 

Wonder Valley doesn’t yet seem to have one. The stated plan is to design Wonder Valley on spec, then try to attract a tenant.

Ratzlaff says he understands that “big players” are watching and waiting. “I think they’ve all seen things come and go in Canada and Alberta,” he says. “‘Till they know it’s a sure thing, they don’t want to sign on the dotted line.”

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The literal road to what may one day be Wonder Valley isn’t straightforward, either. It’s more than 40 kilometres outside Grande Prairie and passes a sawmill, three separate landfills and disposal sites for well waste. At times it carries more heavy trucks than cars and pickups.

Kevin and Lorelei Bowie are two of the site’s closest neighbours. They run KeLore Kennels, a business descended from Lorelei’s dream of breeding Irish setters, on the 112 acres where they also live.

Kevin Bowie is retired from the Grande Prairie fire department and, despite his bad back, a volunteer firefighter in Greenview. “During construction, it’s supposed to bring in a whole bunch of jobs,” he says. “They’re talking like, this basically is going to be its own city. There will be accommodations on site. There’ll be stores, gas stations, all kinds of stuff.”

All that will surely mean more traffic, more trucks, he adds. “I don’t think it’s a detriment, as long as people aren’t stupid.” 

He very much hopes Wonder Valley gets started, partly because he and Lorelei are looking to sell and, if she has her way, move someplace where it never, ever snows. “I’m hoping that’ll help with the sale too—the appeal of the data centre coming in and the spinoffs from it,” he says.

Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, in contrast, isn’t going anywhere. Members of the First Nation use the nearby land extensively, Chief Sheldon Sunshine wrote in an open letter to Premier Danielle Smith shortly after the Wonder Valley announcement.

“Our people have traplines in this area; we rely on the water from the Smoky River; and it is one of the few areas accessible to exercise our way of life, which has been systemically eroded by unmitigated cumulative effects resulting from the provincial government’s authorizations of industrial development in our territory,” Sunshine wrote.

The GIG is on land the province sold to the municipality in 2022. The Sturgeon Lake Cree opposed that transfer at the time. Now, Sunshine’s letter said, they’re learning about development plans from news releases.

“We therefore and respectfully ask that the provincial government cease and desist from using our traditional territory in this manner and in coordination with a proponent, without our free, prior and informed consent,” the chief wrote. The Logic was unable to arrange an interview with Sunshine. All the band councillors were in Edmonton during a recent visit to the First Nation’s administrative office.

Yet work at the GIG is continuing. One morning in late November, just after the first snow had stuck, fresh tire tracks led into the site and off into the bush. A pair of big yellow tripods holding surveying electronics sat by the side of the road, surrounded by footprints. Somebody was in the woods somewhere, measuring something.

Anderson at the chamber of commerce gives Wonder Valley good odds of happening: “I’m all the way up to 70 per cent at this point,” he says. Ratzlaff is hopeful, too. “Things are getting really close. There’s just a last few little hoops to jump through here,” he says. “But things are getting closer all the time.”

With files from Murad Hemmadi in Toronto