Calgary’s role in the global data centre boom is accelerating—and it’s being powered by something the city already understands better than most: energy.
At this week’s Tech Thursday panel on The Tech Behind Data Centres, industry leaders including Joe Gentile of eStruxture Data Centers, Tom Farran of Longbow Capital, and Ben Sutton of CoolIT Systems outlined why Alberta is emerging as a serious contender in the race to build AI infrastructure.
The discussion was moderated by Vlad Oujegov of the Western Canada Data Centre Alliance, following opening remarks from Tech Thursday founder Philippe Burns, who introduced the panel and framed the conversation.
“Alberta is, by many definitions, a frontier market,” Oujegov noted, pointing to the scale of proposals already in motion. Even a fraction of planned projects would represent some of the largest infrastructure investments in Canadian history .
For Calgary-based Longbow Capital, that opportunity is already translating into global traction. The firm has backed energy platform VoltaGrid, which has rapidly scaled from oilfield power solutions into multi-gigawatt data centre contracts, including deals with Oracle and Vantage. The shift underscores how expertise developed in Alberta’s oil and gas sector is now being redeployed to meet the demands of AI.
“There was a massive correlation between the power profile of fracking operations and AI data centres,” said Farran, noting how that realization helped unlock a new growth path .
Meanwhile, Calgary’s own CoolIT Systems is riding the wave of AI-driven demand. The company, which develops advanced liquid cooling technology, now supports seven of the world’s top ten supercomputers and is scaling rapidly to meet hyperscaler demand.
“We have over 140 open positions,” said Sutton. “We can’t keep up—it’s going crazy” .
The economic impact extends far beyond tech companies themselves. Large-scale data centre builds are driving demand for electricians, engineers, and construction workers, with some projects employing up to 1,000 people on-site daily and thousands over their lifecycle .
For eStruxture, demand is already outpacing supply. Gentile noted that facilities are often sold out before construction is complete, as hyperscalers and emerging AI infrastructure providers race to secure capacity.
All of this points to a broader shift: Calgary is no longer just an energy city—it’s becoming a critical node in the infrastructure powering artificial intelligence.
And in a world where compute is quickly becoming as essential as electricity, that may prove to be one of the city’s most important transformations yet.
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