Just past the sign that welcomes drivers to Olds, Alta., sits a parcel of farmland. It’s on the edge of town, across the street from homes and tucked behind the old municipal building, which was sold to the local Co-op two years ago.

It’s where a developer is proposing to build a $10-billion data centre, along with the second-largest power plant in Alberta, to satisfy the world’s seemingly voracious appetite for data.

The natural gas facility, proposed by Synapse Data Centre Inc., will produce 1.4 gigawatts of energy each day, solely to power what could become the largest artificial intelligence (AI) data centre in the county.

That’s equivalent to the daily demand for the entire city of Edmonton.