It has almost nothing to do with AI

Why the data-centre speed-run?

Two mega-projects. Twenty-three billion dollars. Public input steamrolled. They are not racing to serve you. They are racing to pour the concrete before the rest of us work out what it is for.

In your backyard, right now

Two data centres. One almighty rush.

Meta is building a $13 billion centre in Sturgeon County. A separate $10 billion project landed in Olds, population 9,679.

Olds was rezoned in two weeks. The utilities commission bounced the first application for "significant deficiencies." Over 1,000 residents registered to fight it.

The rush is the tell

They do not care that you object.

When a government fast-tracks billions and shrugs off every objection, the speed itself is telling you something. This is a priority that overrides consent.

A priority for what?

The tools are being installed now

Facial recognition. On Edmonton cops.

In December 2025, Edmonton police began testing facial-recognition body cameras. The algorithms come from Corsight AI, co-owned by a firm whose advisory committee is chaired by Stephen Harper.

Add police drones and AI surveillance towers already scanning rural Alberta.

The tools never stay in their lane

Built to fight crime. Aimed at people.

Palantir built ICE a system to hunt people for deportation, detention now at a record 73,000. The "crime-fighting" Flock camera network shows where this always goes.

Officers have been caught using it to stalk ex-partners, one ran a woman's plate nearly 400 times. Flock is bolting microphones to the poles and building a tool to jump from your plate straight to you.

Alberta handed the keys to this

A rap sheet, not a résumé.

Amnesty says Meta's algorithms fuelled the Rohingya genocide. The EU preliminarily found its design addictive and unlawful. A New Mexico jury found it harmed children.

Meanwhile Zuckerberg expands a $300M Hawaii compound. This is who is building Alberta's "nerve centre."

And this is where it ends

AI already picks who dies.

In Gaza, systems named Lavender and The Gospel generate kill lists at machine speed. They run on cloud infrastructure from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

One Microsoft-hosted system stored millions of intercepted Palestinian calls used to plan strikes. The data centre is the engine.

The people building the cages can read a graph

The crisis is early. They know it.

Warming is accelerating past projections. Alberta burned 2.2 million hectares in 2023. Jasper lost a third of its town in 2024. Mass evacuations are already routine.

Now run the clock forward. Climate breakdown. Foreign wars we are told to fund. More people displaced, on the street, and angry. That is a control problem, and a government that has chosen force will need these centres to manage it.

Here is the pattern, stated plainly

The speed-run is the point.

No one has to confess a motive. Watch what the infrastructure does. In Gaza it targets. In the US it hunts.

The same cloud, the same cameras, the same firms are being poured into Alberta at breakneck speed, right as the climate turns. Build the tools first. That is the warning.

The response is not despair

Fight the data centres.

Show up to the hearings. Back the Olds and Sturgeon residents already resisting. Defend privacy, encryption and the right to organize offline. Build power no camera can capture.

Defeating AI data centres is defeating fascism on the prairies.