Canada's Natural Gas Advantage: AI Infrastructure Booms in the West
Western Canada is poised to become a hub for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, thanks to its abundance of low-cost natural gas. The region's established pipelines and processing infrastructure, experienced energy companies, industrial land, and cold climate make it an attractive location for data centers.
Data centers are massive consumers of electricity, with individual campuses measuring in hundreds of megawatts or even gigawatts. Utilities across North America are struggling to build generation and transmission capacity quickly enough to meet demand.
Alberta is already seeing a surge in data center interest, with requests for new connections totaling 19.6 GW, significantly higher than the province's historical peak electricity demand. The province is encouraging major projects to bring their own generation or storage rather than drawing power from the existing grid, which plays into its natural gas advantage.
Meta's Sturgeon County data center development and Tourmaline's proposed Malachite One project are examples of this trend. The latter would locate data center infrastructure and dedicated generation close to existing gas production and processing facilities, creating a new value chain that keeps more economic activity at home.