Carney becomes first PM to visit Saudi Arabia in 26 years - why is he there?

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This is a CBC Podcast. The Prime Minister defends doing business with troublesome countries on his trip to Saudi Arabia. Alberta secures a multi-billion-dollar investment from the tech giant Metta.

And a B.C. conservative leadership candidate calls out the federal party leadership. It's Thursday, July 9th. I'm David Cochran. The Power and Politics Podcast starts now.

We start with Meta's major investment in Alberta. The company that owns Facebook and Instagram, amongst other things, plans to spend more than $13 billion on its first AI data center in Canada. The campus will take up more than 700 hectares.

That is twice the size of New York's Central Park. Sturgeon County has been tapped to house the massive facility, and it is expected to consume one gigawatt of electricity. For perspective, that is equivalent to 70%

of the energy used by the entire city of Edmonton. Now the project is expected to create more than 3,000 jobs during construction and support 300 jobs during operation.

Meta will also spend $60 million to support local infrastructure for the center. For more on this project, I'm joined by Alberta Premier Daniel Smith.

Premier, good to see you again. Thank you for taking some time today. Hi, David. There is a lot of pushback in the United States

against these big data centers, so particularly the hyperscale ones because of noise, energy, water. What makes you so comfortable

with the idea of Meta setting up a facility so large? Well, we've been watching that with great interest as we've gone through this two-year process with Meta and worked with them very closely

to make sure that they found the right site and that they were addressing those issues. So what I would say would be different about this one is that they've located on land

that is zoned industrial and has been for 40 years. It was supposed to be the site of 12 refineries that never developed. So that's one thing.

There's community buy-in that this is an industrial zone. They also are going to bring their own power. That's part of the reason why the site is so big is that they'll be building the power to manage to fuel,

to electrify the increase in growth in the data center and not use the power grid. So that's the other part is that it will keep our prices low but also help to subsidize

some of the transmission costs. And then thirdly, they're using what they call a closed loop water system so that they draw the water once and then they're able to use it for cooling and air cooling. And so I think that when we've been watching some of the other concerns, we think they've

mitigated the vast majority of them with the sighting that they chose here. Well, when you look at the needs, whether I take your point, they're going to provide their own energy. I mean, the physical space this takes up is the equivalent of two central parks

in New York. And the energy demand is equivalent to about 70, 71% of what the entire city of Edmonton uses. So all of that resource, all of that land, and then however they deal with the water

situation for cooling, for 300 full-time jobs when it's up and running, that is a lot for a small nominal amount of employment. Well, I would look at it a little bit differently because we look at the revenues that they're generating for government because when they develop this plant out, they'll be

using more natural gas, so we'll get royalties from that. They'll be subsidizing the power grid on the transmission charges, reducing everyone's power bills by about 6%

on the transmission side. And then all of the additional revenues that will generate, it's a minimum of 250 million a year. There's not that many single employers

or single entities that can deliver that amount of dollars. And that goes into making sure our taxes stay low, it goes into making sure we have additional dollars to pay for growth and healthcare growth

and spending for education. And so we think that that's a pretty good value proposition. It wasn't that long ago though. I'm sure you might have seen that the Premier Wab Canoe

rejected the idea of a specific data center in Manitoba because of the energy demands it was putting on the hydro system there. And basically said it was a big threat to the environment.

Do you share those concerns? Because this is one of the big challenges with these hyperscalers is that it's an emission jump and then there's the water challenges as well.

It's the sort of thing that a lot of people are uncomfortable with on the environmental side. Well, I can see why the discussion might be a bit different in Manitoba because they are mostly hydro and hydro is expensive to build and there's a long runtime on it and so it may well be that

they can't add these to their grids very quickly without impacting other power users. But I can tell you that this is part of the reason why we've been advocating against the net zero electricity rights is that we knew that the only way to fuel this kind of development was through the kind of project that you can bring on quickly and inexpensively and

and that's natural gas. And so one of the starting points that we had with this industry is if you wanna come to Alberta,

you've gotta bring your own power. And if you can, build more power than you need so that you can sell us your extras so that we can keep prices low for consumers.

So I think the conversations in the two provinces might be a bit different because our energy mix is a bit different. Right, so on that energy mix,

so you say they're gonna build their own power, bring their own power. I think Pembina, the pipeline company,