A preliminary analysis puts the proposed Wonder Valley AI data center’s waste heat at “about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day,” yet Alberta has waived a full provincial environmental impact assessment for the project. The calculation by Utah State University physicist Robert Davies concerns the facility’s projected full build-out, rather than measurements taken at a working data center.
Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary backs the $70 billion development, which is planned for northwestern Alberta, 80 miles southwest of the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation’s reserve. Although the location is beyond the reserve’s boundaries, it falls within what is considered the First Nation’s traditional territory. The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation (SLCN) commissioned Davies’s preliminary analysis earlier this year.
“The effect will almost certainly be large, if not extreme,” Davies said to CBC. In his view, the planned development could become the “largest single-site heat source on the entire planet.” Its eventual capacity has yet to be demonstrated in operation.
At issue is the combination of two sources of heat in the same place. According to the analysis, on-site natural gas generators would supply Wonder Valley with about nine gigawatts of power each day, instead of the facility taking electricity from a grid. Producing that electricity would give off heat from the turbines; using it for calculations would generate additional heat in the racks of AI chips.
Davies put the daily thermal load from burning the fuel and running the data center together at between 16 and 18 gigawatts. This calculation underlies his comparison to roughly two dozen atomic bombs. The analogy also appeared in his earlier analysis of a different O’Leary-backed data center development in Utah whose thermal load was similar.
Futurism’s reporting recognizes the atomic-bomb comparison as sensational, but its point is the possibly unprecedented amount of heat concentrated in one place. With a conventional power plant, electricity goes to homes and businesses throughout a region, so its eventual use is distributed across multiple locations. Wonder Valley would instead produce and consume electricity at the same site, bringing the waste heat from both processes together. The analogy describes a day’s energy release, not an atomic explosion.
Davies’s projected environmental footprint extends beyond heat. The analysis puts annual carbon dioxide emissions at about 30 million metric tons, an amount equivalent to more than four percent of Canada’s total emissions.
The Alberta government announced in April that it would waive the more rigorous provincial environmental impact assessment for Wonder Valley, citing the project’s use of standard power and water systems. According to Futurism, legal and environmental experts were disappointed by that choice, although they may not have been surprised.
That reaction was shared by Davies. “I can’t imagine allowing it to go forward without those full assessments,” he told CBC. His concern is that using familiar equipment at this scale doesn’t necessarily produce familiar environmental consequences.
“When people talk about environmental regulations that these projects have to adhere to, those regulations were not created with anything of this scale in mind,” Davies said.
In September, SLCN applied for judicial review of the exemption from an environmental assessment, then sought another review last month. Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas responded with an October 30 statement saying that the exemption leaves the project’s other obligations in place.
According to the ministry, Wonder Valley still has to secure “all required permits, provide detailed technical assessments on impacts to air, land, and water, and demonstrate the project can be built and operated safely before any project can proceed.”
Davies argues that these requirements don’t resolve the central issue: whether separate reviews of individual systems can adequately account for their combined effects. “Permits check the parts. An assessment checks the whole,” he told CBC. “A project this size is exactly what assessments are for.”
