Alberta Data Centre Project Seeks Approval with $15B Price Tag

A massive $15 billion data centre is proposed for west-central Alberta, Canada. Emerald Energy Technologies, a subsidiary of Tourmaline Oil Corp., wants to build the Malachite One data centre on Crown land about 40 kilometres southwest of Edson in Yellowhead County.

The project would be powered primarily by natural gas and generate most of its own electricity. Once fully built, it will consume approximately 150 million cubic feet of natural gas daily and produce 930 megawatts of electricity, with an additional 74 megawatts coming from the provincial grid, bringing the site's total available power to around 1.1 gigawatts.

The data centre would be used for cloud computing, large-scale data processing, and training artificial intelligence models. Emerald estimates that Malachite One will create 300 to 500 long-term jobs and 40 to 60 permanent positions at the power-generation facility.