Alberta Minister Attends Second Town Hall On AI Data Centres, Discovers Fury Compounds Like Interest
The Alberta government sent a minister to a second town hall on AI data centres this week, apparently on the theory that anger is a perishable good.
It is not. Anger keeps. Anger ages in the barrel. The people who showed up to the first meeting with questions about water allocation showed up to the second meeting with the same questions, printed, laminated, and cross-referenced against the minister's earlier answers.
The pitch remains genuinely interesting: Alberta has cheap natural gas, cold winters, and a lot of empty land, which is roughly the ideal recipe for warehouses full of graphics cards guessing at the next word in a sentence. The province would like to be the place where the world's chatbots do their thinking. Fair enough.
The problem is that a data centre is an industrial facility that arrives with the vocabulary of a tech startup. It draws power like a smelter and employs about as many people as a mid-sized dental practice. Residents who have lived next to actual smelters find this arithmetic familiar and are not charmed by the phrase "compute capacity."
One attendee reportedly asked how many litres of water a hyperscale facility uses in August. The answer involved a range. Ranges do not go over well in a room that has already sat through one meeting.
The UCP's broader theory is that opposition is a communications problem, solvable by explaining more slowly. Two town halls in, the evidence suggests the opposite. Everyone understood perfectly the first time.
A third town hall has not been ruled out, which in Alberta counts as a threat.