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On Friday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, economist Jack Mintz joined Ezra to explain why the 'hyperscalers' building Canada's largest artificial intelligence data centres have chosen Alberta and Saskatchewan over Ontario and Quebec, one of the year's biggest economic surprises.

Ezra pointed to Meta's $13-billion AI data centre in Alberta and the $4-billion power plant that will run it — $17 billion in private money with no government funding attached. Saskatchewan has reportedly drawn some $50 billion in planned data centres, and officials there are now discussing nuclear reactors to power them.

Mintz said a map of planned Canadian data centres shows projects in Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic, but the truly large ones are headed west. The draw, he argued, is abundant energy, especially natural gas, plus an entrepreneurial climate and governments willing to write regulations that make AI development easier while still protecting the people affected by major projects.

Mintz also dismissed common objections. Water concerns are overblown, he said, since many centres run on recycled water and may consume only the equivalent of two swimming pools over their lifetimes. And when centres generate their own electricity, as they can on the Prairies, they can feed power into the grid and help lower prices rather than raise them.

Ezra recalled an anti-data centre protest in Morinville, Alta., near the Meta site, where demonstrators recited water and energy talking points but, when pressed, were really worried about AI itself. Many were familiar faces from anti-oil protests — what Ezra described as a rebranding exercise.

Both agreed the boom is genuine diversification, not the subsidy-driven kind Alberta has seen before. Mintz warned that Ottawa's habit of picking winners and losers repeats the failed industrial policy of the 1970s, when trillion-dollar firms like Meta and Amazon need no help at all.