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.
Just a reminder that the UCP has been blocking renewable energy projects.
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/08/06/UCP-Gutted-Alberta-Renewable-Energy-Future/
But I guess a giant fucking gas plant for a single building is fine. 🙄
Alberta.
Just. Wow.
i feel so powerless against the AI shit tsunami that’s coming for us
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.
It’s overwhelming, but we’re not powerless. The best time to start organizing your community against this stuff was 15 years ago. The second best time is now. We’re a lot more powerful together.
Basing an enormous project on a new, highly volatile industry? I can’t imagine any way this could go wrong…
Considering the scale of the Natural Gas Facility alone is going to be enormous and the long term outlook is based entirely on a “Trust me bro” from the tech industry, this just feels absurd.
Oil and gas, and ai. Top of the “Trust me bro” industries.
