The Farmers Who Fought a Data Centre—and Won - Macleans.ca

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Twin Lakes Ranch has been in Brenda Ralston’s family for more than a hundred years. In 1918, her great-grandfather bought 320 acres of gently rolling prairie northeast of Calgary and bred cattle to feed the frontier. Over the next century, his descendants did the same. “My grandpa farmed it. My dad farmed it. My husband and I farm it,” says Ralston. One day, she expects to hand it down to her son, who’s studying animal sciences at the University of Saskatchewan. “He’ll be the fifth generation,” she says.<br>In late May of 2025, Ralston received a letter calling that future into question. It was from Kineticor, a power-generation company that had purchased the land immediately adjacent to Twin Lakes’s calving pasture. Reading the letter, Ralston felt her body tense up with anxiety. There was nothing but farmland for miles around. What were they planning to build? The notice provided few details, but it included an invitation to an information session. So, two weeks later, she drove to a nearby community hall to learn more.

Related: AI has Entered the Cubicle<br>Ralston wasn’t the only one with questions. Roughly 100 locals attended the open house, packing the hall to capacity. A Kineticor representative thanked everyone for coming and then made the grand reveal: the company wanted to build a data centre. The crowd rumbled in perplexed unison. “We were all asking, ‘What the heck is a data centre?’ ” says Ralston.<br>A data centre, the representative explained, is a warehouse filled with row after row of computers. There are about 12,000 such facilities scattered across the globe, including roughly 300 in Canada, and together they represent the physical bedrock of the online world. Whenever someone opens Gmail, checks Instagram, watches Netflix, plays Fortnite or prompts ChatGPT, they’re accessing servers housed in these digital storage facilities. There may be one near you right now. They tend to be housed in unmarked, unremarkable buildings: squat brick structures surrounded by strip malls, or grey industrial boxes wedged between shipping depots and warehouses. Most draw five, 10, maybe 20 megawatts of electricity, a little of which might go toward your barber’s website, or fuel your next YouTube binge.<br>Advertisement

What Kineticor wanted to build, however, was of a different breed: a hyperscale data centre, a new type of facility that is orders of magnitude larger, and vastly more energy-intensive, than older data centres. These are designed to service the extraordinary computing needs of the AI era. According to a dozen poster boards on display at the open house, Kineticor’s would be built in five phases over 15 to 20 years and occupy 1,120 acres of land—more than Manhattan’s Central Park and only slightly less than Calgary’s entire downtown core. Put another way, it would be 1,000 football fields’ worth of warehouses, generators and cooling towers.<br>These colossal operations have been sprouting up rapidly since ChatGPT kicked off the generative-AI craze in 2022. They provide the computing power needed to train and operate large language models (the architecture underlying chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini) and diffusion models (the systems behind image and video generators such as DALL-E and Midjourney). Most of the existing hyperscale facilities are in the U.S., many of them in northern Virginia, which has long incubated high-tech industry. Loudoun County, just a few miles from Washington, D.C., is known as Data Center Alley, and is home to the world’s densest concentration of data centres. Ireland, too, has turned itself into a hyperscale hub. Data centres currently consume about a quarter of its total electricity supply, and developers are now building natural-gas power plants to keep up with demand.<br>At the open house, Kineticor framed its development as an opportunity for Alberta to get in on the action. Founded in Calgary in 2013, Kineticor currently operates two power plants west of Edmonton, with another in development. The company said the project would be a job creator, a foothold in an emerging industry and a boon for the local economy.<br>Ralston didn’t buy it. She wasn’t opposed to data centres in general, but she worried all the commotion would affect the fertility of her herd; cows are sensitive to noise. She fretted about the extra traffic, too. The area was hilly, with poor visibility, and there were already plenty of collisions. Ralston questioned why Kineticor wanted to build on farmland, rather than set up shop in an industrial area closer to Calgary. “This is the best soil in Alberta,” she says. “Once you strip all that soil off, you are hooped.” And what precedent would the development set, she wondered—would more local farmland be sold, too?<br>Advertisement

But what most roiled Ralston was the project’s timeline. Her municipality, Rocky View County, usually spent several years considering major developments. But council...