Proposed Alberta AI data center's waste heat likened to 23 Hiroshima bombs daily

A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta is projected to release a massive amount of waste heat into the surrounding landscape. According to an analysis conducted by Robert Davies, a physicist at Utah State University, the Wonder Valley facility would dump "about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day" into the environment. Davies carried out the preliminary analysis earlier this year for the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation (SLCN), a First Nations community that commissioned the study. He later told the CBC that the impact on the landscape would "almost certainly be large, if not extreme."

The project is backed by celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary and is valued at $70 billion. It has drawn scrutiny because the Alberta provincial government exempted it from a more rigorous environmental impact assessment. The exemption was granted on the grounds that the facility will rely on standard power and water supply systems.

Futurism, which first reported the story, characterized the facility as potentially the largest single-site heat source on the entire planet. The project is still at the proposal stage.