Alberta’s ‘Wonder Valley’ Is Still Just a Thought

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…