Article by Rebel News staff.

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A couple of weeks ago, Ezra Levant travelled to Morinville, Alberta, a small city north of Edmonton, to cover a protest against a massive new data centre being built nearby. About 200 people showed up on a Sunday, and Ezra was struck that most of them weren't professional protesters — just ordinary, genuinely concerned Albertans.

A data centre, Ezra explained, is really just a building packed with tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand, computer chips. That computing power doesn't just run your Netflix account or your Facebook feed — it's the engine behind artificial intelligence itself. And it didn't take long standing among the crowd in Morinville for Ezra to realize that's what actually had people rattled.

The talk of water use, land use and power consumption was really a stand-in for a deeper unease about AI itself.

It's an understandable instinct, given we've all had our own moments of longing for the days before smartphones, before the constant pull to check a screen every 30 seconds.

But wishing a technology away has never worked, from the original Luddites to Ted Kaczynski, and Ezra doesn't think it will work this time either. He compares the moment to the Cold War space race: if the United States had refused to go to the moon on principle, the Soviet Union would have gone anyway.

Watch Ezra Levant and Sheila Gunn Reid hear from data centre protesters in Alberta 

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Today's equivalent, in his telling, is China versus America on artificial intelligence — and Ezra would rather see AI developed under the rule of law than handed to the People's Liberation Army.

But none of that actually settles whether a data centre belongs on this specific patch of land in northern Alberta. So after hearing the protesters out, Ezra went and found the man responsible for getting the project approved: Nate Glubish, Alberta's Minister of Innovation and Technology.

The project itself belongs to Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, and represents a $13-billion investment. Alberta won it thanks to a cooler climate, available industrial land, and, according to Glubish, a regulatory system that actually moves. Ezra says what floored him most in the interview was the timeline: from conception to shovels in the ground, just two years. It's hard to think of a single major project in Canada built that fast. After all, pipelines take decades if they get built at all — proof, in his view, of what happens when the federal government stays out of the way.

Ezra met Glubish right at the construction site itself: a boggy, swampy field being prepared for building, ringed by refineries and upgraders. It is not, Ezra notes, "some pristine mountain glade with Bambi frolicking nearby." It is arguably the most industrial patch of ground in the country, which is exactly where a project like this belongs.

Ezra also flags a comment that came up in his reporting on the protest. Futurist Yuval Noah Harari's talk of a future "useless" underclass sedated by drugs and video games because AI has replaced their work.

That's the fear driving the opposition, Ezra says, and he believes proponents of AI owe the public a hopeful, positive vision to answer it.