Alberta’s ‘Wonder Valley’ Is Still Just a Thought ⇥ theverge.com

Josh Dzieza, in a Verge feature about Kevin O’Leary’s data centre in Utah and the citizens protesting its development, has a small update on how things are going for O’Leary’s proposal in Alberta:

For developers, this presents what [Paul] Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Digital, calls a “chicken-and-egg problem.” In order to finance construction of a data center, you need an anchor tenant, but all tenants care about is speed, so the best way to attract one is to get everything aside from the actual data center — land, power, permitting — ready to go. “If you’re talking to a hyperscaler today, they’ll say, ‘Don’t even talk to me unless you can show me a pathway to potentially lighting up my first data centers by mid 2028,’” Palandjian says.

This dynamic is part of the reason there are so many “world’s largest data centers,” more even than O’Leary’s two. Mixed in with real construction projects are paper data centers, speculative ventures specced out to their maximum theoretical capacity and announced as if they were shovel-ready with the aim of catching the attention of a hyperscale tenant. Many amount to nothing or very little. It’s been nearly two years since O’Leary announced his first Wonder Valley, in Alberta. There is still no publicly announced tenant, and according to the Greenview planning department, no permit applications have been filed.

If you recognize the byline on the Verge’s story, it may be because Dzieza was also behind great reporting on the massive Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin. I admire finding a beat as particular as long-form stories about incoherent but elaborate building proposals. For what it is worth, the most recent progress on Alberta’s “Wonder Valley” is redesignating the site.

I still cannot get over the proclaimed seventy billion dollar cost for Wonder Valley. You could build five of Meta’s similarly massive Albertan data centres for that price and still have billions left over. It is about the same as Meta is sinking into its Hyperion effort in Louisiana. It is madness.