The one that clears up half the confusion
Announced, committed and rejected are three different things
Four categories get reported with the same word, and telling them apart changes the whole picture. Never read “$X billion is coming” without asking which one it is.
A provincial ambition.
The $100 billion figure is a five-year goal for attracting investment, not money committed.5
Money in the ground.
Meta broke ground in Sturgeon County on a facility it puts at more than CA$13B and ~1 GW.6
Budgeted, not built.
Four facilities across Olds, Bonnyville, Calgary and Edmonton, $1.26B, 240 MW, on the province’s register.7
Turned down.
The AUC rejected the Olds power plant8; Rocky View voted a campus down six to one.9
Still open
What we genuinely do not know yet
We will not publish a number here until we can point at where it came from.
How many announced projects will actually get built?
The queue is roughly ten times the connectable capacity, so most announcements cannot proceed on the implied timeline. Which survive, and when, is the most useful thing anyone could tell an Albertan. We track it on the tracker.
Are today’s builds better than the case studies?
Cooling, water recycling and efficiency have moved fast, and many worst-case studies describe older facilities. Whether a 2026 Alberta build is genuinely cleaner and less thirsty, and by how much, may be the whole argument.
Every source is on Citations.