It’s been a huge week for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — and a terrifying one for the future of the human race.
Hot on the heels of announcing a proposal for a new oil pipeline, Smith unveiled yet another horrifying project that will send us careening towards climate dystopia: Meta’s new, massive $13 billion AI data centre.
The project’s energy needs are significant. Meta describes it as a one gigawatt data centre. The entire city of Edmonton draws about 1.4 gigawatts.
Oh, and it’s set to be powered by fossil fuels — because who cares about the climate crisis anyway?
The data centre is set to be built in Sturgeon County, Alberta, a small municipality with a population of a little over 21,000 people — one that has also faced severe droughts and wildfires in the past.
In announcing the data centre, Smith made a lot of promises: 3,000 jobs during construction, 300 operational jobs once the data centre is up and running, and Meta is pledging to invest $60 million in related local infrastructure. The project, according to Smith, will also generate at least $250 million for Alberta each year.
Not only that, but she had talking points locked and loaded in anticipation of public pushback on issues like the data centre’s water and electricity use.
But here’s the thing — her claims don’t tell the full story. When you look at the entire picture, it’s clear that this mega project is not only risky for the community surrounding it, but also for the country as a whole.
Let’s talk about it.
Sure, it uses less water — but at what cost?
One of the main sources of pushback for data centres has been their insatiable thirst for the fresh water that we, as humans, also need for our survival. That’s probably why Smith went out of her way to pre-emptively tackle the concern with a post that she began by saying “fact check time.”
“(Meta)‘s Sturgeon Data Centre will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling that requires no operational water use for cooling. In fact, it will use less water than an average Alberta golf course,” she wrote in the post.
We can gloss over the fact that golf courses use an obscene amount of water — in the U.S., for example, golf courses use an estimated 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for irrigation.
But her claim about the closed-loop, liquid-cooled system also shouldn’t reassure anyone who worries about the climate impact of data centres.
See, data centres get really hot because of the computer processors that are constantly running. To keep things running smoothly, they need to have cooling systems in place. That’s where the huge water needs for data centres come into play.
The worst kind of cooling in terms of water use is evaporative cooling, where water is douses the hot surface, evaporating and cooling off the equipment in the process.
Closed-loop cooling uses less water. There’s an inner loop, which is actually sealed off, and an outer loop. In the inner loop, there’s a coolant, like glycol, which moves between the hot equipment and a heat exchanger — and that liquid can be recycled indefinitely. But the heat still has to go somewhere, and that’s where the second, outer loop comes in.
According to the National Observer, in most designs, the outer loop carries the heat to cooling towers which evaporate (you guessed it!) water to get rid of it. Uh Oh. Plus, this water has to be changed regularly for new, fresh water or the minerals will concentrate and mess up the pipes and equipment. That’s why closed loop cooling still ends up using a whole lot of water.
Now, the Alberta project promises not only to use closed-loop cooling, but also dry cooling as well. To me, that reads like they’d skip that last water-intensive part and instead use “dry cooling” to get rid of the heat that the closed-loop system displaced. Dry cooling uses fans to push air over the hot equipment. It can address the water needs, but it seriously amps up the energy requirements.
You know what that means, in the context of this project? You guessed it. More fossil fuels being burned.
“To keep cooling that water as it goes through the data centre time and time again, you not only need coolants that can be toxic chemicals, but you also need a lot of electricity to cool that water down,” said Paris Marx, a tech critic and author who has a new book coming out in October on the ways data centres are pushing our planet past its breaking point.
“So that means that the electricity demand of the facility is going to be even higher, which means a greater demand for natural gas and more emissions as a result of that.”
In short, when these data centres don’t guzzle water, they guzzle electricity instead — and this data centre is powered by fossil fuels.
That means it’s going to be far from eco-friendly, even if it doesn’t drain the nearby water sources.
Okay, but it’s bringing its own power right?
Even if these data centres are power hungry (in the sense that they literally need a lot of electricity), Smith assured us it won’t impact the reliability and cost of power for Albertans.
“The data centre campus will be developed under Alberta’s “bring your own power” approach,” she posted on Twitter.
“Rather than relying solely on Alberta’s electricity grid, the project will combine grid-connected electricity with generation from a new $4.6 billion private-sector funded on-site natural gas power plant, helping protect grid reliability.”
Without more details, it’s hard to say what impact this project will truly have on the grid. A lot is dependent on the timelines of projects, the power the plant is able to generate, and the supply of natural gas.
But there’s one thing that’s very clear about its impact: it will be a new massive source of fossil fuel emissions in Canada, on par with a city more than two thirds the size of Edmonton.
“If they need so much energy that they need to develop their own power plants, then that tells you the effect that that … kind of development is going to have, and the amount of emissions that are going to be created and added to the system as a result,” Marx said.
Natural gas is terrible for the environment. While some politicians around the world have attempted to rebrand LNG as green energy, research shows LNG is 33% worse than coal when it comes to its greenhouse gas footprint.
That means while Canada is already being rocked by the impacts of climate change — worsening wildfires, flooding, extreme weather, deadly heatwaves and more — this new project will balloon our emissions, all so an American company can power its AI.
And while this is a provincial project, the extent of the federal government’s complicity in the climate impact here becomes apparent when you look at internal documents. DeSmog, in collaboration with the Tyee, published a Privy Council document from 2025 that suggested AI data centres can “provide markets for Canadian energy.”
So while we desperately need to reduce our oil and gas emissions to tackle the climate crisis, the government is excited about creating more demand for a fossil fuel that’s dirtier than coal.
And while a few people get rich off the sales of gas and the AI slop it powers, Canadians — and the world — will be left to bear the climate consequences. That includes, by the way, a hefty pricetag.
“Why do we actually need all of this? That is really not clear, but our government seem to be happy to chase it regardless,” Marx said.
“Because it means investment, it means some jobs — probably not a ton at the end of the day — and because Mark Carney is completely AI-pilled and Danielle Smith wants new markets for the fossil fuels being created in Alberta.”
