A levy of up to 2% on the value of computing equipment. That is the line on the province’s own data centre page, and it is worth reading twice, because it tells you exactly what Alberta has decided to charge for. The racks. The servers. The physical objects sitting on a floor in Sturgeon County. There is no corresponding line anywhere in the framework for the thing those objects are actually there to process.
Key facts
- The Government of Alberta states that large-scale data centres pay a levy of up to 2% on the value of computing equipment and that the province provides no public subsidies and no discounted power.
- The Government of Alberta projects about $250 million a year in royalties, taxes, levies and transmission fees from the Sturgeon County data centre campus announced at $13.0 billion on 8 July 2026.
- That campus holds an approved 970 megawatt grid connection, with up to roughly 1,800 megawatts of on-site generation contemplated at full build-out, per the Government of Alberta.
- The province puts the campus at about 3,000 workers at peak construction and about 300 permanent positions.
- The Expedited 120-Day Approvals Act, 2026 requires regulator decisions within 120 days for designated qualified projects carrying capital investment of $250 million or more.
The framework prices hardware because hardware is easy to count
Every instrument in this file measures a thing you can photograph. Capital investment. Megawatts. Square footage. Construction headcount. Permanent positions, at about 300 against 3,000 at peak, which is the ratio anybody who has read a capital project assessment before will recognize.
That is not laziness. It is how public finance works. A regulator can verify a transformer. A regulator cannot verify a training run.
But the asset in a data centre is not the building and it was never the building. It is what the building processes, and where that processing output ends up owned. Alberta has priced the shell at up to 2% of equipment value and left the contents unpriced and unmeasured, and no document in the provincial framework requires anybody to say whose data went in or whose model came out.
The default pattern costs a province twice
Here is the default, and it is not a conspiracy, it is simply what happens when nobody writes a rule. Operational data from Alberta businesses, farms, utilities and hospitals moves out under ordinary commercial terms. A model is trained on it somewhere else. The finished product is sold back into the province at a subscription price, and the Alberta firm that supplied the raw material pays retail for the result.
That transaction is legal, normal and happening now. It is also the exact structure this province spent forty years learning to dislike in another commodity, and the argument against it is not sentimental. It is arithmetic. You get paid once for the input and you pay forever for the output.
The second pattern is available and it is duller than the first. Treat operational data as an asset with terms attached. Build compute against the province’s own generation, which Alberta is already doing at scale. Require that a producer whose data materially trains a model has a contractual position in what that model earns. None of that requires a new philosophy of technology. It requires a schedule in a contract, and schedules in contracts are the most boring thing in public administration and the only part that ever holds.
What is missing is not a strategy, it is a clause
The province has moved fast on the physical side and deserves credit for it. The 120-day decision requirement for projects above $250 million is a genuine fix to a genuine problem, and any province that has watched a file sit in a queue for three years understands why it exists.
Speed on the building is not the same as terms on the contents. A campus can be approved in 120 days, energized inside three years and generating $250 million a year to public accounts, and still leave every question about data ownership exactly where it was on the day the site was announced.
Counties hosting these projects have been given the questions that are easy to ask. Water use, which matters and was covered when Alberta’s water came up in the spring. Road wear. Noise. Local hiring. All real, all worth asking, none of them the question that determines whether the province owns any part of what gets built here.
Ask the province’s own officials three things and ask them in writing. Whether any provincial agreement with a data centre operator contains a term covering the ownership or licensing of data processed on Alberta soil. Whether the levy of up to 2% on equipment value is the only charge contemplated on the operation, or whether a charge on output has been examined and rejected. And which minister’s office holds the file, because a question routed to the wrong department comes back in nine months as a form letter. The next round of town halls is the place to put it, and the answer should arrive before the concrete does.
