CALGARY, June 9—Alberta is touting its abundant supply of cheap fossil fuels to entice tech companies to build data centers for the AI boom, a move that would undermine Canada’s plan to link new data center development with clean energy expansion.
Canada is the world’s fifth-largest producer of natural gas, around 60 percent of which comes from Alberta. As well as huge fossil fuel reserves, the western province boasts a cooler climate that can offset the cooling costs of data center infrastructure and plenty of available land. All that can make operating data centers more cost-efficient than in the United States, where they are facing pushback from communities and lawmakers….