Just past the sign that welcomes drivers to Olds, Alta., sits a parcel of farmland. It’s on the edge of town, across the street from homes and tucked behind the old municipal building, which was sold to the local Co-op two years ago.
It’s where a developer is proposing to build a $10-billion data centre, along with the second-largest power plant in Alberta, to satisfy the world’s seemingly voracious appetite for data.
The natural gas facility, proposed by Synapse Data Centre Inc., will produce 1.4 gigawatts of energy each day, solely to power what could become the largest artificial intelligence (AI) data centre in the county.
That’s equivalent to the daily demand for the entire city of Edmonton.
When we were kids, there was a field near us that we played in. A large part of our lives was lived in that field. One day we heard rumors of the field being turned into a subdivision, houses, roads, the works. A week later the first survey stakes appeared. We went to work. They put them in, we took them out. It stayed our field until we all started getting old enough to move out of the neighborhood. We were just kids, and we shut their shit down.