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.

A phased approach

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approach in several wholesale electricity markets in the U.S., where the rush to build out data centres has, at times, superseded capacity concerns.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.

In 2024, at the start of Alberta’s push to attract AI data centres, Technology Minister Nate Glubish said Alberta would be an attractive landing place for companies because its deregulated electricity market allows for off-grid power generation.

“Really our power system is … not built to power those data centres, not at this scale. So that’s why the policy’s, first of all, bring your own generation because there’s just not enough power to power them,” Li said.

Electricity prices

During Trump’s state of the union address last week, he introduced an initiative called the “ratepayer protection pledge” to shift AI-driven electricity costs away from consumers onto technology companies.

AI systems require massive amounts of computing power, which come from servers stored in data centres. Powering those data centres and cooling the machinery requires lots of electricity. As utilities in the U.S. look to meet the immense power demand from AI, in several cases, the costs of grid upgrades have been passed on to the everyday consumer.

A 2025 report from the Center for American Progress found utility costs are rising across the U.S. due in large part to the increased electricity demand of AI data centres. Residents in at least 41 states are seeing higher electric and gas bills.

In the U.S., Felder said residents are pushing back on data centres, with affordability becoming a rallying cry. A report from Data Center Watch, a project run by AI security company 10a Labs, found community opposition to data centres is accelerating, with an estimated $98 billion in U.S. projects blocked or delayed in the second quarter of 2025.

In Alberta, a similar sentiment is growing. AI infrastructure projects have also seen rejection or pushback, like a Kineticor proposal in Rocky View County.

The province’s Utilities Statutes Amendment Act, formerly Bill 8, which was passed last December, paves the way for AI data centre projects to generate their own power. The act also requires data centre developers to pay for any upgrades to the electrical transmission system to support the vast amount of power that will be consumed by the centres.

In a November press conference, Affordability and Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf was asked what was stopping data centre proponents from taking their business elsewhere, like Virginia or Georgia.

He responded: “What other jurisdictions are facing now is … these data centres built where they built, and there was a lot of additional costs that ratepayers had to bear and then they, in retrospect, they have to try to make those adjustments and changes and that’s what’s inhibiting them. 

“Us doing this ahead of time upfront gives them a clear line of sight, gives them long-term stability on those costs and we are still competitive with all those parts and pieces.”

Grid reliability

In its latest long-term reliability assessment, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC — which assesses grid reliability across Canada and the U.S. — found that over half of the regions it assessed face resource challenges over the next 10 years due in large part to data centre growth. 

According to NERC, PJM Interconnection, the largest power grid operator in the U.S. (which covers Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centres in the world) is at an “elevated risk” for power shortfalls over the next two years, and at a “high risk” from 2029 onwards. 

In Canada, too, grid reliability is challenged, with data centres and other increased electrification adding power demands on electrical systems, while climate change-driven extreme weather events and aging wear out existing infrastructure.

While AESO’s phased approach intends to maintain reliability for now, Li said the challenge is that the AI data centre buildout demand is advancing so rapidly that the grid may not be able to keep up.

“Alberta for example, our grid’s not super strong… It’s kind of independent. [It] doesn’t have really very strong connections to other jurisdictions. So that’s even more important that we have to maintain, really, the grid’s stability, make sure it’s operational.”