Trump wants AI data centres to bring their own power. Alberta’s been doing that from the get-go

Albertans listening to the U.S. president’s state of the union address last week may have experienced a sense of deja vu when it came to Donald Trump’s plans for AI data centres: “We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs.”

In Alberta, the UCP government has been championing the “bring your own generation” model for its plan to attract over $100 billion in investments for AI data centres. 

And while the U.S. has developed far more AI infrastructure, Alberta also sees a major opportunity to capitalize on the AI boom, given what its colder climate, vast real estate and deregulated electricity market have to offer. 

Here’s how Alberta’s data centre buildout compares to the U.S., so far.

Faced with unprecedented demand from companies trying to connect to the province’s grid, the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) identified 1,200 megawatts it could spare for large load data centre projects without compromising grid reliability, announced last June.

Frank Felder, an American independent power consultant who works with data centres, said there's been a different approach in several wholesale electricity markets in the U.S., where the rush to build out data centres has, at times, superseded capacity concerns.

Felder said regional transmission organizations and independent system operators (independent organizations that oversee electricity generation and delivery to consumers in deregulated markets) in the U.S. have not been taking a phased approach like Alberta has.

“These markets do not say, 'look, we can connect next year, you know, 1,000 megawatts of data centres' or whatever the number is. The data centres just connect, and then everyone scrambles,” he said.

“The concern is that more data centres connect than … new supply to meet this additional load. Then what happens to … wholesale prices and reliability?”

According to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank, U.S. data centres consumed more than four per cent of the country’s total electricity in 2024 — that’s roughly equivalent to the annual electricity demand of the entire nation of Pakistan.

By 2030, electricity consumption by U.S. data centres is projected to grow by 133 per cent.

Alberta’s AI data centre buildout, by contrast, is more recent than in the U.S. And while several large data centre projects have been proposed, including a massive complex in Olds, Alta., many are in the early stages of approvals or construction.

Ryan Li, a professor in the University of Alberta’s department of electrical and computer engineering, called Alberta’s approach “diligent,” adding that AESO “knows the grid better than anybody else.”

“And I think that's a reasonable amount of power (1,200 megawatts) just to let these data centres connect first,” the cap representing less than 10 per cent of the province’s total power load, currently.