Kevin O’Leary is playing Alberta for a $70 billion fool

Kevin O’Leary loves a good deal. At least, that’s what he’s made it look like on Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank, where he plays the role of an outspoken investor with a keen eye for value. Now, he’s trying to cash in on that reputation — again — with a proposed $70 billion megaproject in northern Alberta, one that would capitalize on the growing frenzy around artificial intelligence technology and the data centres that will feed its increasingly voracious appetite for information. And this time, it’s O’Leary making the pitch. 

The UCP government is already welcoming it with open arms — and celebrating it as the biggest investment in Alberta’s history. “Excited to see this incredible project led by Kevin O’Leary coming to Wonder Valley, located in the Municipal District of Greenview,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on social media. “With Alberta’s low taxes, free market, abundant natural gas and skilled labour force, we’re positioned to be a world leader in AI data centres.”

First things first: this “incredible project” is, for now, just a website and a letter of intent signed between O’Leary Ventures and a small rural municipality. So far, it seems far more like an attempt to shake incentives and subsidies out of local governments and capitalize on the global investment community’s fascination with AI right now than anything real or tangible. 

The website in question features a video that has to be seen to be believed — and even then, only as a punchline. The imagined bucolic landscape of rolling hills, gentle streams and friendly wildlife feels like a Disney-fied version of northern California rather than northern Alberta. The campus itself is straight out of Silicon Valley.

The narration is even more hilariously unrealistic, if that’s even possible. "There's a valley,” we’re told, “where technology and nature will come together in perfect harmony. Where the future will pulse at every turn. Bursting with nature and wildlife, nurturing the present as it embraces the future. The valley where the brightest minds unite, where electrons, machines and data come together in an algorithmic dance.”

Where they’d actually come together, according to the map in the video, is a parcel of land near Highway 40, more than half an hour from the bustling metropolis of Grande Prairie. It will have access to some nearby stranded gas assets, which could theoretically be used to provide some of the electricity that the facility would consume. But at full capacity, it would require 7.5 gigawatts of power, which is almost 40 per cent of what the entire Alberta grid can currently provide — and that’s with increasingly frequent brownouts and some of the highest electricity prices in Canada. 

Where, exactly, would all these additional electrons come from? Not wind and solar, which the provincial government has spent the last two years actively undermining with its new regulations — ones whose standards around land use and reclamation, curiously enough, don’t apply to oil and gas operations. Instead, they’d come mostly from additional gas-fired facilities, which just happens to suit the UCP government’s pro-fossil fuel agenda perfectly. 

The good news if you care about the climate is that O’Leary’s track record is far heavier on making promises than fulfilling them. His aborted bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada ended with his endorsement of Maxime Bernier (who later lost to Andrew Scheer), and saddled the campaign’s various contractors and contributors with more than half a million dollars in unpaid debt. His eponymous mutual funds, meanwhile, were a well-documented disaster, as Joe Castaldo detailed in a long feature for Maclean’s in 2017. And in a piece for Canada’s National Observer, Bruce Livesey dug deep into O’Leary’s past business dealings and found a trail of disappointed investors and employees. 

That’s especially true of Mattel’s purchase of The Learning Company from O’Leary, described by CNBC as one of “worst mergers of all-time” in a 2009 article. As Livesey noted in his piece, “shareholders launched a class-action lawsuit, naming O’Leary as a defendant, accusing him of insider trading and of being part of a scheme to obscure TLC’s financial state. While O’Leary denied the allegations, in 2003, Mattel settled the lawsuit for $122-million — considered a ‘mega-settlement’ at the time.” 

Paul Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Ventures, also has his own colourful  backstory. The Florida-based real estate developer, who joined O’Leary Ventures in 2022, is also a former professional tennis player and actor whose credits include playing the Fenway Park security guard in Fever Pitch and “Cookie Guy #2” in Rescue Me. His Instagram account declares that he “believes in miracles.” 

Their company will need a few of those in order to get “Wonder Valley” built. As Enverus energy analyst Carlson Kearl told the Calgary Herald’s Chris Varcoe, “the idea that you need to have seven and a half (gigawatts) all in one place — so far away from the end markets and not in the United States — just makes me think that there’s a lot of obstacles to overcome in order to find hyperscaler tenants looking to do their [AI model] training there.” 

Yes, the project has already secured the enthusiastic backing of an Alberta government that seems willing to believe almost anything if it leads to an increase in the use of fossil fuels. But as O’Leary should know better than most, not everyone is so wilfully blind — or so easily duped.