Could AI become Alberta’s next source of national leverage?

0:00Welcome to Alberta Edge, a podcast from the hub about the social, economic, and political forces pulling the country west. I'm Felice Chin, the hub's Alberta Beeral Chief. There are probably easier ways to spend the summer than standing in front of a room full of angry Albertans, worried about massive AI data centers moving into their communities. But that is essentially what my next guest has been doing. Nate Gloubish is the Minister of Technology and Innovation in the province of Alberta. He's fresh off a series of talent halls where residents raise concerns about everything from water and noise to electricity, land use, and artificial intelligence itself. Minister Nate Gloubish joins me now. Hello, welcome to Alberta Edge. Hey, thanks for having me on a show. Understanding that the folks who attended these events tend to be self-selected, what's the surprise you most about what you heard in terms of the opposition? Well, I don't think anything I heard surprised me.

1:00I mean, we know that there are lots of folks who have questions about AI data center development. And these are reasonable questions. They've all seen cautionary tales in other jurisdictions that rushed in, didn't do their homework, didn't do their due diligence, and the approach they ended up taking caused objective harm to the local citizens, either through significant increases in their electricity bills, the ratepayers subsidizing infrastructure for data centers, or just not having the right environmental controls for air or water or otherwise. These are objectively bad things, and Alberta are right to have questions and to be concerned about them. The good news is that we've done our homework as a province. We didn't rush in. We didn't want to be first. We wanted to be the smartest. And so we've spent the last two and a half years studying all of the cautionary tales and developing our own legislative framework that's fair, reasonable, but definitely competitive and protects Alberta's interests.

2:03And so these town halls were, I think, a good opportunity. First of all, just to hear from those Alberta who have concerns, invite their feedback, but also to share the information about what we have done as a province to protect their interests. And in most cases, we've got good answers for what they're asking. And our hope is that that will bring some reassurance to folks that Alberta is doing this a little bit differently, and we're trying to do it the right way. Right. We've talked about this quite a bit on this podcast, but just to remind listeners a little bit, what are the key regulations and guidelines in place right now? Well, one of the biggest issues that folks have questions and concerns about is it's a combination of reliability of the electricity grid and affordability of electricity. You know, they don't want to see their bills going out because of this infrastructure. And so a couple of the things that we've done to protect against that is really to focus on and bring your own generation approach to say, look, if you want to build here, you

3:05should have a plan to build your own generation, build your own power plant, build it on site so that you are scaling the power supply at the same rate as you're scaling the demand. If you're going to be a large load user of electricity, you should also be a large load supplier of electricity. And if we do that imbalance, then our grid is going to is not going to come under strain causing challenges in the pricing. So that's one piece. Another piece is to say, if you do qualify to connect to the grid, because in some circumstances, there can be some cases made where it does make sense in some cases for an initial load that then buys them time until they can build their own generation. First and foremost, they're not allowed to just do that on their own. They have to get approval and permission to connect into the grid. The Alberta Electrical Systems Operator makes that decision only if they can be certain that the grid is going to remain stable. But if they do, then we've passed legislation to implement a cost causation framework.

4:09And what that means in simple terms is if you do get approval to connect into the grid, you pay 100% of the cost to connect in. So the old way, you know, for any other industry, if you get approval to connect into the grid, the grid itself pays for the transmission infrastructure, the transformers, the substations. Very pricey. It can be hundreds of millions of dollars for something like this. And then all rate pairs cover those costs through the transmission pool. So we all see the transmission charges on our electricity bill. That's what that goes to pay for. With this framework for data centers, there are the only ones treated this way. They have to pay 100% of that cost. And they still have to be rate pairs. They still have to pay transmission fees just like everyone else. They will actually be among the largest transmission fee payers in the entire province. And what that means is their transmission fees will actually offset the costs of a burden's electricity bills. And so just to try and make this real, when we look at the metasite that is coming in Sturgeon County,

5:14they had to pay over a hundred million dollars for the infrastructure to connect into the grid for the allotment that they secured from the grid operator. And the fees that they will pay in transmission costs will result in approximately a 6% reduction in every Albertans transmission costs in perpetuity. So done the right way, we can absolutely mitigate against the concerns that Albertans have. Done the right way, we can actually see a reduction, a modest reduction in their bills. And we can protect this stability of the grid. Yeah. And one would assume a meta would want to overbuild because they want to have that 5.9's reliability 99.99% uptime, right? And so in this scenario, when done right, it could actually create overbuilding, which is more supply means lower prices for everyone. One of the exciting things about that too is that so in the meta case, they secured 970 megawatts of grid access,

6:15but they are also building an 1800 megawatt power plant in partnership with Connecticut, Pembena, up in the same Sturgeon County site. So they do have plans to expand, but also because they are coming here, that's bringing more generation online. If more projects like this come forward, where they take an initial portion from the grid to buy them time so that they can make sizeable multi-billion dollar investments to build more power plants in Alberta, then we also do have the opportunity for their power plants to connect into the grid and provide a backstop if ever the grid is under strain or requires additional electricity. So again, for us, it was all about, we only want the right projects done the right way so that we can ensure that all burdens will all benefit. You'd ask about some of the other questions. I mean, another big one is water. A lot of folks have questions about what might this infrastructure mean from a water supply perspective? Where I see a lot of those questions coming from is they're often looking to examples

7:17of some out-of-date technology, the evaporative cooling systems that many cloud data centers have used and older data centers have used. And it's correct to say that if that technology is used, then they would be using an extreme amount of water. But again, we're confident that we've done the homework to protect Alberta's interests and there's a couple things. First of all, we have a very strict water licensing process. So again, you can't just show up and start using water. You have to get a license to do so. Any new licenses are under what's called a first and time first and right basis. And essentially in layperson terms, what that means is that if you're getting a new license today, everyone else will have a license before you comes first. So in a period of scarcity, if you were the last one to get a license, you were the first one to get turned off. And what that means is that individual Alberta households will never face a water scarcity because of a data center coming online. Secondly, there are some jurisdictions in Alberta

8:17that are already facing water scarcity. Much of their water is already allocated for irrigation or other purposes. And so those basins are already closed to new licenses, which means you can't get a license. So we've got good protections. And then the final piece is that all of the new, newest data center architectures are requiring a more modern cooling system. So they're using closed loop liquid cooling systems today. Maybe tomorrow they'll use a more modern technology that's even more efficient. You fill that loop once and it operates like a radiator in your car. It lasts for the life of the vehicle. You don't have to refill it. It doesn't consume water. And so as a result, when you look at a fully built out site at the meta project, they're going to use less water than the average golf course. And Surgeon County's got over a dozen golf courses. And nobody ever asked a question about that. So the point is that right project, right location, done the right way.

9:18Well, the meta sites in the Albert industrial heartland, it was always zoned for heavy industrial. It was originally going to be a refinery site. Instead, now it's going to be a data center. And this infrastructure uses way less water than even like a traditional refinery would. So I think a lot of it is that folks are just maybe this is a new industry. It's new infrastructure. So people have questions. They're cautious. That's all fair. Yeah, just staying on your water point. Yeah, closed loop system uses way less water, recycles the water. One might argue why not make that a requirement then for data centers. So go one step further with the regulation. What's the challenge in striking that right balance? Because who knows maybe tomorrow, closed loop will be outdated and we won't need water at all. And now you have government mandating people use water. How do you strike that balance? Yeah. Well, I think for us, if we were to look at strengthening the rules beyond what we already

10:19have, and again, I what we do have today is very strong. And if we wanted to be a bit more prescriptive, we would need to be careful not to say, thou shalt use this technology architecture. Because to your point, technology changes over time and a year from now, that technology might be out of date. And we don't want to have to rewrite the rules, rewrite the legislation every six months. So if we were to do anything, we'd probably look at an efficiency level. So to say a certain amount of water relative to a certain amount of megawatts of capacity of data center or compute and marry that up to what the best practices have today. And then just say, you require this or better. Now we haven't gone that far yet because we didn't feel that we needed to because all of the serious players who have real plans for real projects that actually have a chance of moving forward, they're all building on best practices. They're all building on this because you can't really operate a modern AI data center

11:22without using the best cooling technology available. These chips are more sophisticated. They are more dense, they generate more heat. And therefore you need the best cooling technology to actually ensure that you can operate them. Evaporative cooling technology just doesn't cut it. But we're exploring whether or not we may need to add that just so that we can reassure Albertans that, hey, only the best is going to be used in Alberta. You know, like, I don't imagine that's going to cause anybody any heartache. Right. Despite all these safeguards and thinking ahead, the main criticism I hear from these town halls is that the government is rushing to things. And now we have the opposition NDP also calling for a moratorium on new data centers. How do you respond to that? Well, I would say, I mean, we've been working on this for two and a half years. So I don't consider that to be a rush. You know, we saw the opportunity two and a half years ago, we recognized that this was

12:22going to be a transformative technology that was going to require significant physical infrastructure. In other words, the data centers and the power generation that goes with it. And this would essentially be critical infrastructure for the economy of the future. And that the jurisdictions that can play host to that infrastructure are going to be winners. And those that don't are going to be beggars in the economy of the future. We wanted to position Alberta so that all of the burdens can be active participants in and winners in the economy of the future. And so we began doing homework to say, let's look at all the cautionary tales. Let's design a regulatory framework that's fair and protect sub-Bertens interest. And then let's promote Alberta as a jurisdiction where you can get things done. We have a track record of building big industrial things. We've done it before with the old sounds. We've done it with petrochemical facilities. We've done it with refineries. And we know that we can do it with data centers and we can do it responsibly.

13:22We've said from the beginning, yes, we are pro data centers, but not at any cost. I'll pick up on the economic benefits a little bit later, but just staying on the grid and the pressures on the grid with what's been allotted already during the transition period before data centers have their own generation up and running. What meta is taking and what this other data center is taking, it's already used up all of that allotment basically. Isn't that effectively a moratorium on more data centers? Well, so let's double click on that term moratorium and what are people really asking for? They're asking for us to make sure that we only proceed if it's in Alberta's interests. And if it's not that we draw the line. And I would argue that what we're doing with our policies is already accomplishing that, right? You have a site like meta that is in the Alberta industrial hardland. It's in land that's been designated and zoned for heavy industrial for decades.

14:26They've gone through all the approval processes. They've done all their homework and they're bringing their own generation. They are following all of our rules. They're being a good actor. And then you have by contrast, for example, in the olds, you had that project proposed by Synapse, which was recently rejected by the Alberta Utilities Commission. It was the wrong project and the wrong location done the wrong way. And so our process clearly has been working to say, right project, doing things the right way, makes it through all the hoops. Wrong project on the wrong way doesn't make it through. To your point about the grid allocation, this was our way of saying, right? I should say the grid operators we have saying, we know we have 1200 megawatts that we can allocate to data centers and do so responsibly and do so so that our grid is still stable. We know that because we have close to 3000 megawatts of spare unused capacity in the grid today. And they did all their engineering exercise to say, as long as it's located here, here,

15:29and here in the province where we have the spare capacity, then yes, we can authorize this allocation. And to your point, that has been taken up. So even if there were other great proposals coming, there's no room to accommodate them anyway, right? So nobody has the abilities today to access grid power beyond what's been allocated. What we are going through right now is looking at when would it make sense to authorize a phase two of allocation and if so, under what terms and how much power? What we're working on with the grid operator is to ensure that phase two looks a little different. So phase one was permanent access to the grid. So you're just like any other grid customer, except that you had to pay your own way, you had to pay for all the infrastructure. Phase two is going to be a temporary allocation, which is essentially you get this for a period of time until you build your new generation, then you transition solely to your own generation.

16:31And it will also have an interoperability feature. So what that means is that if the grid comes under strain, you're the first one to be turned off. And so anybody that wants to access any of that second phase of grid electricity for a data center project would have to agree to those terms and be held accountable to those terms. So what that means is that whatever gets allocated on a phase two, it essentially doesn't risk the stability of the grid because if the grid becomes under strain, you can immediately call that power generation back to support the rest of the grid. We've heard a lot unclear from Albertans. Stability and reliability of the grid is paramount. So don't mess with that. And we agree. If folks don't want to participate in that phase two under those terms, then their only alternative is self-supply, bring your own generation and wait until you can build your own generation. If you want access to any grid electricity as a stop cap to get started, then you'll have to do it on our terms and only on our terms. Staying with phase one then, I've recently spoke with someone who represents industrial

17:36and incumbents. These are the majority users right now, large load users. I'm talking about cement plants, petrochemical facilities. You mentioned some of those manufacturing and so forth. She says that her clients are concerned about that transitional period we're talking about between what we would love to see happen and what's been a lot of during the gap period. Meta, which is the biggest example here, was a lot at almost a gigawatts of grid capacity, but its own gas plant will be an online toll around 2030. So what happens during that gap? How do you ensure that existing industries aren't effectively making room for these new entrants? Well, this comes back to the point I made earlier, which is that the grid operator before making a decision on phase one's allocation amounts looked at the existing grid, both from a generation capacity perspective and from a load consumption and demand perspective.

18:41And they concluded that we had close to 3,000 megawatts of unused generation capacity online available every single day. And so they said, well, we don't want to give all of that up because it's important to have a cushion. We do need a cushion so that if there are spikes or if there's any generation capacity that comes off line, that we can absorb those blips. But they did their engineering analysis included that they could safely allocate 1200 megawatts of that cushion to data centers and that we that would not cause any capacity constraints on the rest of the grid's users, including all of our heavy industrial users, including folks in the industrial heartland. So this wasn't just done your randomly. There was a lot of engineering analysis that went into this. Then it was done in a public open process to say we have 1200 megawatts available. Anybody wants to build a data center and wants to connect in. We need to meet these criteria, come and bid on this, put your best foot forward, tell

19:44us what your plans are. And through that, there was actually about five or six proponents that received an allocation. And then afterwards, many of them negotiated amongst themselves in meta ended up purchasing some of those allocations to get enough of the power to be able to proceed with their planned project. So that's how that allocation worked. We can confidently say based on the grid operators analysis and engineering expertise that that 1200 megawatt allocation, including the portion going to meta is not going to jeopardize reliability the grid for the rest of the industrial or residential and commercial users. And any new allocations that may be considered in the future will have more strict conditions, including the interruptability feature and the temporary nature so that it's not a permanent addition to a great demand. I don't think there are main concern is grid reliability. It's more just a price sensitivity issue because as I understand it, these plants already

20:45do what's called demand response. So when the price is a bit too high, you know, it doesn't justify them creating their widget or whatever it is that they're doing, they might turn down power use or shut down for during peak period or whatever, they already do this right now. So the concern is that with data centers coming online during that bridge period, there may be more demands for that kind of ramping down. The way I look at it is that, you know, let's just look at supply and demand. Up and until this point, there hasn't been enough demand to justify new generation being built and coming online in this province. Some of that was due to federal government policies that were, for example, the clean electricity regulations, which would have made it impossible to build any new natural gas power generation in this province ever, which would have been devastating for our province. And so as a result, the grid as it is was not going to expand with any new base load power.

21:47Now that we've been able to negotiate the clean electricity regulations away through our new U with Prime Minister Karni, and we've been able to demonstrate that Alberta is a place where big data center infrastructure can be built. This is bringing a new wave of significant investment into power generation infrastructure, both for the bring your own generation, but also just in general. And with this new supply coming online, this is going to help to balance out the signals of new demand that's going to come over the next two, three, four, and maybe even five years. So our approach is to try and say, let's make sure that Alberta is a place where the supply side can grow along with the demand side. And to your point, yes, there's the principles of demand management that you've mentioned are part of the grid today. But that's also within the framework where everybody is able to access a fixed contract over multiple years, which helps to smooth that out. So those are the wholesale rates that are paid out of the grid system to the generators.

22:47But at the end of the day, the ratepayers are able to lock in, and those locked in rates are designed to shield folks from short-term fluctuations in supply and demand. So really the short term, the biggest risk that we need to mitigate is stability of the grid. For all the reasons we've just talked about, we've got great safeguards for that. In the mid to long term, we want to protect Alberta against price spikes that they would have to absorb. In the short term, they're already protected by having access to fixed contracts. In the long term, as long as we make sure that enough new generation is coming online in parallel with the new demand, then the equilibrium that we need to see will be maintained. On growing the supply, we all know there's an abundance of natural gas in this province. So that's not a question really. But what I'm hearing is that getting new capacity connected to the NGTL system. This is the main pipeline system that moves gas around Alberta is not exactly easy. And sometimes there's a wait list for years.

23:48Do we risk trying to solve the electricity borrow neck problem by creating a natural gas pipeline borrow neck problem instead? Yeah, that's a great question. So this is something that we've seen as something that needs some time and attention. And you know, she comes as no surprise. We know the natural gas industry very well as a provincial government. And we've been working very closely with all the natural gas players to say, look, this is a wave of infrastructure that is coming. We are positioning Alberta to be an attractive destination for this investment. And you need to get prepared. You need to be ready for this. So that means in terms of actually getting more gas out of the ground. But it also means in terms of the pipeline infrastructure within Alberta to get the gas from where it's produced to where the power plants are going to be. And we're grateful to our partners in the natural gas industry for taking this seriously and for spending time with us to understand where the market's going and how to start making the investments on there end to prepare for this so that they can scale.

24:48And then when we have serious project proponents on the data center side and the power generation side, we just make sure to loop them in with the right folks on the gas side so that they can start talking about where are you thinking about building? Where's your power generation assets going to be? How much gas are you going to need? What's your ramp? So how much need in your one compared to your five compared to your 10? And let's start talking about what you need so that we can make sure that we can match our investments to accommodate what you're looking for. So this is an ongoing effort. But to my point earlier, to do this the right way, it has to be by design and not by accident. If we had just said, yeah, come to Alberta and figure it out. Then we would be going through a lot of the problems that you've described. We're doing the heavy lifting ahead of time to make sure that we can work with all of the appropriate players from every link in the supply chain to make sure that we can do this and scale. And every link in the supply chain can scale in parallel with one another so that we don't

25:48end up with one of these bottlenecks. Right. So that introduces another moving piece, I guess, in TZ energy. Putting this all together now, would the province entertain the idea of introducing more incentives for large load users to curb demand or shift their energy use to help optimize the grid? And by incentive, I don't mean what's happening right now, which is more of a cost avoidance, incentive, quote unquote, I'm talking real incentives here. Look, that might be a better question for my colleague in affordability utilities. What I'm focused on from the data center side is to say, how do we make sure that we protect reliability and affordability of our grid? And we've talked about all of those protections. How do we make sure that Albertans are going to benefit? And we can talk about what that looks like in a little bit here. And how do we make sure that if these are built, they're built responsibly and held to our standards? And I'm confident we're taking all those steps.

26:50And then we're working with all the folks in the supply chain to make sure that if there are any bottlenecks ahead of us that we're working on solving those in advance so that by the time some of this new capacity comes online, that we're ready to meet the challenge. And I think the fact that companies like Meta are voting with their wallet and saying, we will spend $13 billion on this data center. We will partner with Pembon and Kineticor to spend $4.5 billion on the power plant. They're doing that because they see the work we're doing and they recognize that the government is doing the heavy lifting to ensure that our regulatory fairing, fairing, competitive and protect sub-artons interest but still finds a way to get good projects built. And they also see that we're doing the work to make sure that any of these bottlenecks are addressed. Yes. But on the residential front, we're also seeing some market-driven solutions that incentivize individual homeowners to shift their usage to other times and get potentially rewarded

27:53for that. Yeah. But I think there are examples and other jurisdictions where these kinds of mechanisms have been used and they can be very powerful and beneficial to residents that have embraced them. That's a completely separate topic from the data center file. I'm the data center nerd. The kinds of concepts that you're raising here, I think they have a lot of merit for exploration but that's not my expertise or not my wheelhouse. And I think that my colleague, Minister Sigurdsen, would be a great maybe follow-up for you to chat with on that topic. Sounds good. I want to zoom out now. If Alberta remains the most welcoming place for data centers and even if only a fraction of those projects being proposed actually get built, we would logically end up posting an enormous share of the country's computing capacity. Here on to that, all this conversation about AI sovereignty, the idea that Canada needs

28:56to control more of its own compute. Then suddenly we're talking about Alberta not just hosting another industry, right? We'd be hosting the infrastructure that you mentioned earlier. That's so critical to the future economy. What are the broad implications of so much of Canada's future computing capacity being concentrated in one province? Well, I'm glad you bring this up and it's a topic that we could do a whole segment just on this question. But let me zoom out first. The first point I would make is our goal initially was to demonstrate that large gigawatt scale infrastructure can be built in Alberta. That we can do it responsibly. We can protect Alberta's interests. We can assure that Alberta will benefit and we can attract private investment without needing any subsidy, without needing any grants, without needing any tax credits. We've mission accomplished. We've proven that with the meta-site coming in, agreeing to follow our rules and do it

30:00our way. But that wasn't the end goal. That was just the first step of a broader strategy. To your point, it's going to be critical infrastructure. It's going to underpin the economy of the future. It's going to be built somewhere. It's looking more and more like that the largest cluster of compute in Canada will be built in Alberta because we are the ones who can scale the energy needs to meet the demand. Our goal is just to say whether you're a hyper-scaler offering products like meta or maybe one of the other big names or maybe you're a local Alberta or Canadian company, we want to be able to meet all of those needs. Ideally, the whole run for us is to see more Alberta-owned, Alberta-operated, Canadian-owned, Canadian-operated infrastructure that's built in Alberta to serve the needs of the country so that Canadian researchers, Canadian innovators, Canadian companies can all access state-of-the-art

31:03modern technology and they can build their own tools, build their own AI engines and algorithms and models and they can do that on infrastructure that's subject to Canada's loss so that their data is secure and sovereign so that they're intellectual property is secure and sovereign. So we believe that we can be the hub that will support the big, hyper-scaler players as well as local domestic demand and we've been saying we want to position Alberta as the compute capital of Canada. Our hope is that our partners across Canada will see that this is just another way that Alberta is trying to be a good partner in Confederation. There is going to be enormous demand all across Canada. Very few jurisdictions in Canada can meet the demand from a power generation perspective. You'll go back today, you can't get 5 megawatts of energy without getting signed off from the minister because they just don't have the capacity, they can't scale fast enough, whereas in Alberta we can. And so our goal is to say it doesn't matter how much power you need and the way I articulate

32:07to folks to say let us be the digital refineries, let us build the digital pipelines. We will take the gas here because we have the gas, we will convert it to electricity and I value to it. We will take the electricity that we generate here and we will add value to it and create intelligence and then we will export that intelligence to every corner of this country and all over the world at the speed of light through fiber digital pipelines so that we can meet the compute needs of the entire country and other partners around the world. Our hope is that that will be received well throughout the country to say, look Alberta's not just an energy superpower, we are a technology superpower and we are good partners and confederations say like if we don't get it built here you won't have access to it at all or you will be dependent on only accessing it from the United States and in today's climate you can see that that can become a risk if you are dependent solely on a single source and they can turn it off. We don't want our friends across Canada to be at risk of having access to the best technology

33:09in the world turned off and we believe that building this infrastructure here in Alberta and meeting the needs of Canadians all across this country is just another way that we can demonstrate that we are here to be good partners in confederation. But how might that change our relationship with the rest of the country though? Optimistically it sounds like you are saying you would make us a better partner in confederations not so optimistically you could interpret it as entrenching this asymmetry of power and economic might I guess that the energy sector already displays, you know if all the political decision making remains in central Canada and then we become yet again another enabling force for another industry and do so much of the heavy lifting in the sector, how might that for better or worse alter our leverage and our relationship with the rest of Canada?

34:11Well I think you know Albert said for a long time said you know why can't we be the source of all of the olongas needs of this country? Why won't the rest of the country accept this gift we have to offer to them of energy security in order to do that we would need more pipelines to get our products to eastern Canada? That has been a long frustrating frustration point for Albertans. I think this current trade war with the US has opened the eyes of many Canadians in eastern Canada to say oh I think I understand what Albert was talking about now because we get all of our gas and all of our oil and all of our energy from the US or we get it from a pipeline that has to go through the US to get to us and therefore we are at risk in a trade dispute time of the Americans holding that over us. We don't like how that feels and oh the solution would be just to say yes to a pipeline from Alberta to Ontario or a pipeline from Alberta to the East Coast and we're seeing public sentiment shift across this country to start being much more open-minded

35:17to pipeline infrastructure and recognizing that this wasn't just a bunch of greedy people in Alberta saying we want to make more money this was a burdensome we can help secure the prosperity of this country and energy security is a significant cornerstone in that foundation to have a secure economic future. So while Canada is coming to terms with that in light of the trade war, we're seizing on that with the work that we're doing with other promises to try and move forward with the various pipeline proposals demonstrating that this is to strengthen all of Canada not just to strengthen Alberta. This is a true win-win if we all pull together and make it happen. My hope is that given that this data center infrastructure is a new conversation just starting that we can frame it in the same way to say there's only so many places where this can get built. Alberta is the obvious home run location.

36:17Compute security is going to be just as important to the economy the future as energy security. Let us be the supplier of that for this entire country so that not a single Canadian or Canadian business would ever go wanting for access to the best technology available. We can secure that for every Canadian and we're doing the heavy lifting today to make sure that that infrastructure can be built responsibly so that Alberta will benefit to make sure that we do it the right way. But the real home run is to say if we do this at a national scale Alberta could supply the needs of the entire country and make sure that every Canadian will benefit. I'm hopeful that there's a bit of a parallel here between the pipeline conversation for traditional energy and the digital pipeline conversation of the new energy which is intelligence and compute. So I'm hopeful that the positive progress we've seen on bilateral relationships between Alberta and other provinces and Alberta and the federal government will put us in a position where the country will see that this isn't all a branch from Alberta to say.

37:27Let us help raise the quality of life and the economic potential for every Canadian. There's very few places that can accomplish that Alberta is I would argue the only place that can accomplish that. I want to end on the public sentiment piece you just mentioned. They are being pulled in the opposite direction right now. You know all the people who are yelling at you in those town halls that's just the beginning if we are to look at what's happening in the US for example it's become a bipartisan issue opposition not necessarily to data centers it's sometimes it's more just a stand in for artificial intelligence in general. How do you think about this wave of opposition that's coming. I think you made a great point which is that some of this resistance to data center infrastructure is the data center itself is more proxy for a bigger issue which is just a fear of what AI might represent and how that might change our lives in the coming years.

38:31And so what what we're trying to demonstrate is look AI is here to stay and this infrastructure will be built somewhere if we say no in Canada it will be built somewhere else probably in China if free and democratic societies choose not to keep up with the forefront of AI technological development then we will see the control over the most powerful tool in the world to an undemocratic state. I would argue that's not international interest so there's the broader question of if this technology is going to be built. How do we make sure that friendly democratic nations remain on top so that we can protect our economic interests and our security interests then when it comes to just the AI use itself one of the things that we're trying to do is lead by example to demonstrate to Canadians and Albertans what does responsible AI use look like and how is that being used to make your lives better. We can give some great examples of how we've used AI in the public service to deliver better faster and smarter services into safe taxpayers money.

39:36I've got an entire sub-stock column I've written recently talking about how the Department of Infrastructure had come to us to say we need help developing a new system. We initially went to do an RFP the best bid was a $54 million contract over four years we didn't have four years and we didn't have $54 million. We said we're going to park that let's see if we can do this ourselves and we were able to develop it ourselves to our own standard on enter price grade application that meets all of our cyber thresholds all of our criteria for a software. We did it in ten months for two and a half million dollars. So we saved Albertans $52 million and we solved a four year problem in ten months and we can do this time and time and time again. So our hope is to show folks that we can all benefit through responsible AI use and when there are abuses of AI as a tool we're going to be very careful to legislate protections against that. We're going to be bringing forward some deep fake legislation this fall especially to target the use of AI for intimate images and video without someone's consent.

40:44This is an example of a clear abuse of AI that's objectively wrong it should be against the law we're going to make sure it is against the law. So we want to find that balance of how is AI going to make lives better let's make that as relatable to everyday Albertans and Canadians as possible. Let's identify the risks let's make sure that we are surgical in our legislative response to protect against those risks and my hope is that over time folks will recognize that we're doing this very proactively to ensure that all Albertans and all Canadians will benefit my hope is that folks will warm up to the idea. Well thank you so much for your time today minister. Thanks for having me. Nate Globisch is the Alberta Minister of Technology and Innovation. I'm Felicicin Alberta Bureau Chief for the Hub. If you enjoyed this podcast give us a five star rating on whatever platform you're listening to that could really help us. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Alberta Edge where every story and conversation begins with a Western perspective.

41:49Alberta Edge is generously supported by Don Archibald the Hub. Thanks him for his ongoing support.