Alberta Municipality Bets Tens of Millions on Wonder Valley Data Centre
March 9, 2026
Reading time: 4 minutes
Full Story: The Energy Mix
Jody MacPherson
Photo of Kyle Reiling speaking at the PTAC conference. Provided by PTAC.
This story is part of our ongoing investigative series, Hidden Wonder Valley.
A rural Alberta municipality has spent about C$70 million to lay the groundwork for ‘Wonder Valley,’ the proposed site for the world’s largest artificial intelligence data centre powered by North America’s largest gas-fired plant.
And while the municipality lacks a formal purchase agreement more than a year after the project was first announced, a local official says he’s confident it will move forward.
The process has not been easy, Kyle Reiling, executive director of the Greenview Industrial Gateway (GIG), where Wonder Valley is being floated, told a gathering of the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada (PTAC) in Calgary last week.
First announced by Kevin O’Leary in December, 2024, the vision for Wonder Valley is massive: the celebrity investor promised to raise $70 billion to build a 7.5-gigawatt gas-powered data centre on 14,000 acres in Greenview, about 460 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
At one point, when Reiling was balking at the plans for millions in spending, he said council told him to keep going: “‘we believe in this, we believe that this is the right thing to do, and we’re going to signal to the province and we’re going to signal to industry that we’re moving ahead with this.’”
Reiling said he modelled the industrial area after the Heartland Designated Industrial Zone northeast of Edmonton.
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Heartland is a formalized agreement to streamline regulations and cluster petrochemical infrastructure in one area. Five municipalities, some environmental groups, and more than 40 companies participate, with help and incentives from the provincial government.
Greenview is not a designated industrial zone but was originally the site intended for a petrochemical plant. The initial plan was to process gas into commodities like ammonia, methanol, and ethanol, but Reiling said the community “couldn’t get the carbon hub created in time.”
It was a “real letdown for the region” when the project did not go ahead, he said.
He added that the municipality has invested millions over the last decade on roads, water outtake from the nearby Smoky River, laser imaging, and geochemical and biophysical work on the industrial land.
Reiling, who is an employee of the municipality, is also actively involved in planning the Wonder Valley project.
“Our conference calls start very early because we have members in the United Arab Emirates, but we also have members in Indianapolis, New York, Florida, Louisiana, and Grand Prairie,” he told the PTAC audience. “And we get together with one common goal, and that’s to design Wonder Valley.”
Last month, O’Leary’s company announced a second Wonder Valley project in northern Utah that would be the same size as its Alberta twin. “The reality is that we’re competing against Utah, where they have given them a 12-week approval process on 13,000 acres,” Reiling said.
The Alberta government has offered support to companies, including access to a provincial concierge service to help AI data centre proponents navigate the regulatory process.
“We will work with you and bring the right people to the table at the right time and make sure that they have all the context that they need,” Technology and Innovation Minister Nate Glubish said in his keynote speech to the PTAC forum.
Alberta is willing to work with proponents to make the process “super easy, super simple, super-fast,” Glubish added.
“We’ll connect you to the gas provider. We’ll pinch through the fibre. We’ll help you navigate your water licences. Whatever it is you need, we’ll help you with that.”
Court documents show the province’s Aboriginal Consultation Office advised Greenview to skip Indigenous consultation when it applied for a permit to withdraw water for two locations along the Smoky River for Wonder Valley.
The water permit was granted by Alberta Environment and Protected Areas in April of 2025 and Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation has appealed the decision through the Environmental Appeal Board, a legal challenge working its way through the courts for almost a year now.
Reiling said the project will still need approvals for a permanent outtake water facility on the Smoky River, which would follow “phase two consultation” with the six to seven Indigenous communities in the area. Consultation is under way and “will take time.”
He said the GIG is the “cheapest place in the world” to produce electricity, with gas reserves of 25.3 trillion cubic feet and more than 5,000 wells.
The Wonder Valley site is directly on top of the Montney Formation, one of North America’s, if not the world’s, largest gas reservoirs. In 2024, said Reiling the project would require 10% of all the gas supply available in Alberta once fully operational.
Glubish said AI data centres are a way to bypass the dilemma of building gas pipelines and get billions of cubic feet of natural gas to global markets “through ones and zeros, through fibre.”
Experts say the Wonder Valley data centre alone could wipe out all of the gains Alberta made in reducing carbon emissions by phasing out coal-fired electricity 20 years ago.
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