Alberta is placing a high-stakes wager on becoming a North American hub for artificial intelligence infrastructure. However, a critical analysis warns that the province's focus risks stopping at building the physical foundations—the data centres—while missing the more valuable opportunity to cultivate a homegrown AI industry powered by local talent.
The Infrastructure Gold Rush and Its Limits
Over the past year, Alberta has moved aggressively to position itself as an AI infrastructure powerhouse. The province has attracted commitments for up to $100 billion in data centre investment. This push is further solidified by a federal-provincial memorandum of understanding (MOU) that explicitly links increased oil and gas production and new electricity generation to the goal of powering these AI data centres.
The sheer scale of this infrastructure build-out is undeniable. Yet, the pressing question emerging is what Alberta plans to build on top of all that concrete, steel, and immense electrical capacity. Globally, the experience with large-scale data centres shows they are voracious consumers of power but create relatively few permanent, high-skilled jobs. A hyperscale facility may employ thousands during construction but often needs only a few dozen technicians to operate it once completed.
A Cautionary Tale and a Local Talent Deficit
The situation in Ireland serves as a stark warning. Data centres there now consume approximately 21 per cent of the nation's electricity—more than all urban homes combined. This has led to restrictions on new connections in the Dublin region and a fierce national debate about whether the economic benefits justify the immense strain on the power grid.
Alberta risks importing this model—absorbing the grid stress and climate impact—without securing the high-value work that designs and deploys AI applications. The province is already grappling with a severe talent shortage. While data centre plans promise new job opportunities, local educational institutions are struggling to keep pace. Between 2021 and 2023, Alberta's post-secondary schools produced just 3,302 tech graduates. In a stark contrast, employers in the province created 24,500 new tech roles from 2022 to 2024.
This deficit is compounded by a persistent brain drain. Graduates often leave for tech hubs like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal when they can't find suitable roles or career growth pathways in Alberta. Subsequently, many are lost again to opportunities in the United States and Europe.
Capturing the Full Value Chain of AI
The true economic prize in the AI revolution is not in providing the raw computational power, or "compute." The high-margin, durable value resides in the products, platforms, and specialized services that are built on top of that compute. These innovations are powered by people: AI engineers, machine learning specialists, data scientists, and cloud architects.
Regions that succeed will be those that develop deep, applied AI expertise within their own companies and institutions. This enables them to capture productivity gains and create exportable solutions. Conversely, those that treat AI primarily as a utility—renting out cloud capacity for other countries to build their AI products—will miss out on the lion's share of the economic value.
The dual danger for Alberta is clear. On one front, the province could end up hosting energy-intensive infrastructure that primarily serves global platforms and out-of-province clients, while bearing the associated grid and climate risks. On the other, Alberta's own businesses and startups may continue to struggle to hire critical AI talent, forcing them to default to generic, off-the-shelf tools that may not address the province's unique industrial and economic needs.
The path forward requires treating data centre policy and AI development policy as two connected but distinct priorities. Building the infrastructure is the first step; cultivating the human capital and innovation ecosystem to use it effectively is the essential, and far more challenging, second act.
