Wonder Valley isn’t really a data center. It’s a gas power plant with a server farm attached.
Kevin O’Leary’s $70 billion project would burn natural gas on site and generate about nine gigawatts, with no grid connection. Utah State physicist Robert Davies adds the chips’ heat to the turbines’ heat and gets a thermal load of 16 to 18 gigawatts. He told CBC that could make Wonder Valley the biggest single-site heat source on Earth.
Twenty-three bombs a day
Davies measures that heat in Hiroshima-sized bombs: 23 of them, every day. The framing sounds like a stunt, yet the math holds. Run 16 to 18 gigawatts for 24 hours and you land in that range. He used the same comparison for an O’Leary-backed project in Utah.
The image hides the real issue, which is concentration. A regional power plant spreads its waste heat across the homes and factories it serves. Wonder Valley puts the turbines and the GPUs side by side.
Davies also estimates the site would emit 30 million metric tons of CO2 a year. That tops four percent of Canada’s total.
Why bring your own power plant
Grid connections take years. The International Energy Agency puts the wait for new power lines at four to eight years in advanced economies. A developer with deep pockets and a gas supply can skip that queue, and Wonder Valley does.
Wall Street’s patience runs shorter than a grid queue. Investors wiped about $500 billion off Alphabet’s market value in one session after its capex more than doubled from a year earlier. A $70 billion bet on turbines and GPUs gets no special grace.
Gas isn’t unusual in this industry. In Virginia, which hosts more data centers than any other state, gas generates more than half of the electricity. Those plants serve a whole grid. Wonder Valley’s would serve one customer.
Davies has a name for the hybrid: a “Gigascale AI Smelter.” Massive compute fused with massive power generation, in his telling, and no existing rulebook was written for it.
A permit for every part
In April, Alberta exempted the project from a full provincial environmental impact assessment. The reason: it uses standard power and water systems.
Davies sees the flaw. “Permits check the parts. An assessment checks the whole.” He argues that no regulation anticipated a project this size.
Alberta’s environment ministry says Wonder Valley still needs every required permit. Its October 30 statement also promises detailed technical assessments of air, land and water before anything proceeds. O’Leary Digital, meanwhile, argues that a federal review would duplicate provincial oversight.
Back to court
The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation commissioned Davies’s analysis. The site sits outside its reserve, but inside land the nation considers traditional territory. In September, the nation filed for a judicial review of the exemption. Last month, it asked for another.
The ruling will show whether regulators ever judge an off-grid AI campus as one system. Watch whether Alberta’s permit process models the combined heat at all, or checks each turbine and server hall alone. Other developers pairing gas turbines with GPUs will read the answer closely.
If you have a link sheet with other pages, send it, and I’ll check for better fits.
Related: Nvidia’s DSX POD Turns the AI Data Center Into a Shipping Container
