The Wonder Valley Files, Part 1: Big Promises, Suspicious Numbers
Thanks to a cache of documents obtained late last year through Freedom of Information requests made by Canada's National Observer, Canadians can now gain a little more insight into Kevin O'Leary's "Wonder Valley" project.
But the heavily redacted documents, which have been examined by Blunder Valley, might raise as many questions as they answer. We'll be exploring some of these questions in a series we're calling "The Wonder Valley Files".
Swimming with sharks
"Would be the largest data centre in the world", reads the punctuation-free email. You can almost hear the breathless, barely-contained excitement from its sender, Kyle Reiling, who's been hoping to land a big-fish project like Wonder Valley for years.
In December 2025, Reiling, director of the Greenview Industrial Gateway (GIG), told The Logic that the Municipal District of Greenview has spent "$70 million to date" on work to get the industrial park shovel-ready. But despite those efforts, and despite the excitement around the Wonder Valley announcement in November 2024, there hasn't been a whole lot of visible progress since: other than a single road with a truck turn-around, the site remains empty.
And after combing through this 600-page cache of documents and emails, I think it's worth asking if Shark Tank personality Kevin O'Leary was ever serious about building the "largest data centre in the world", or if he always had other plans.
O'Leary, a showman whose actual business ventures have been perpetually mired in controversy, built his career on being the center of attention, and the Wonder Valley proposal definitely got a lot of press. But O'Leary Ventures isn't a data centre company. Why would any smart investor hand them $70 billion to build a data centre campus several times the size of anything already in existence?
(So far, it seems that the only investor interested is US billionaire Frank McCourt, whose "Project Liberty" previously partnered with O'Leary on the astroturfed "People's Bid for TikTok", a doomed attempt to purchase the social media platform. McCourt has pledged to contribute $100 million, or 0.14% of the total Wonder Valley price tag.)
So is Kevin O'Leary actually about to build the world's largest data centre? Here's a more plausible scenario: O'Leary made a bombastic promise that he had no intention of keeping, and he's been misleading the municipality and the province in order to advance his own interests.
To be clear, that doesn't mean he won't build anything on the GIG at all. Perhaps the real plan was to construct a much smaller (but still enormous) AI data centre—or perhaps, as some of the emails hint at, a huge bitcoin mine instead.
Playing them like a fiddle
Regardless of O'Leary's true intentions, making a wildly oversized pitch has its advantages. For one thing, everyone in the industry is guaranteed to hear about it, which makes it easier to find companies eager to work with him.
And if there's a favourable political environment, this strategy can save a lot of headaches in terms of planning, permits, and so on: O'Leary surely understands that if local and regional governments are sufficiently excited about a project, they'll jump at the chance to clear away any regulatory hurdles. A smaller project is unlikely to get this kind of white-glove treatment.
O'Leary may also be leveraging the municipality's desperation. One email in particular, sent to the municipal planner in December 2024 by a concerned member of the public, doesn't mince words:
"I know business is business but he is taking you, this Province and The Premier as fools, don’t underestimate the timing of all of this as he thinks we are on our knees and suckers."
Greenview and the GIG have had multiple proposals for the site fall through over the years, even after sinking so much time and money into it. Reading through the emails, you get the sense that everyone on the municipal side is a bit star-struck by O'Leary, and actively wants to believe what he's saying, even to the point of ignoring multiple red flags.
For example, the municipality's top elected official, Reeve Ryan Ratzlaff, says he's not worried about delays or plans falling through, telling The Logic, "they [OLeary's team] just started moving a little bit slower to make sure that they had everything as perfect as they could get it”.
All of this has worked in O'Leary's favour: both Greenview and the GIG have put in real effort to accomodate his demands, including pushing through subtly-worded but important changes to zoning rules on behalf of the project (something we'll discuss in a future piece). Danielle Smith's Alberta government, for their part, recently exempted Wonder Valley from requiring an environmental assessment. And federally, Mark Carney's Liberals are now allowing gas-powered data centres in Alberta, despite the fact that this project would single-handedly set Canada's emissions goals back 20 years, reversing all the progress from phasing out coal in Alberta.
A Suspiciously Convenient Water Usage Number
One of those aforementioned red flags appeared in an email sent by Reiling on October 31, 2024:
"My water numbers were wrong
Just so you know
6GW is around 20 million cubes of water".
One day prior, Reiling emailed similar news to the company handling the water supply infrastructure for the GIG, telling them he'd "just received confirmation that their water requirements at full build out is [redacted] so this design is perfect."
Here's the problem: according to an expert estimate reported in The Energy Mix, the water consumption of a data centre of this size, plus the on-site gas plants that would power it, is on the order of 112 and 195 million cubic metres per year. That's 5 to 10 times larger than the number Reiling was given. That expert estimate is also roughly in line with Blunder Valley's own estimates of the likely total, based on available published data.
Now, maybe someone's finger slipped while they were punching numbers into their calculator, and that's where the 20 million figure comes from. Simple mistake.
But if it is a mistake, it's a remarkably convenient one.
Because it just so happens to be a little less than 24 million cubic metres—the maximum amount the GIG is allowed to divert from the Smoky River each year, according to the Conditional Master Water License issued by the province. 24 million is also the number that the water intake & storage designs were being based on.
20 million, in other words, would be the perfect number for O'Leary Ventures to feed to Kyle Reiling if, say, they needed to soothe any last-minute, pre-announcement jitters about the overall feasability of the project. Probably just a lucky accident though!
Malice, or incompetence?
So what's going on? Here's few possibilities:
Possibility #1: the "20 million cubes" number really is the result of a massive calculation error.
If true, it suggests a level of incompetence that shouldn't inspire confidence about the future of the $70 billion project. The physical reality is that data centres and gas plants require a huge amount of water for cooling; without it, things overheat and break.
Possibility #2: the "20 million cubic metres" number is a lie, and Wonder Valley plans to divert and consume far more water than their permits allow.
This seems risky. For one thing, it sounds wildly illegal. But the risk here goes beyond legal liability, or even moral hazard: it's a risk to other people's lives and livelihoods. As reported in The Energy Mix, in July 2025 the Municipal District of Greenview joined Pincher Creek in declaring an agricultural disaster for the livestock industry due to "worsening drought conditions and persistent moisture shortages".
And as we noted in a previous piece about a data centre proposal in Pincher Creek, Alberta rivers, particularly those fed by the receding glaciers and snow pack of the Rocky Mountains, are expected to have their flow rates decrease as the world gets warmer. Whether we like it or not, we need to start making difficult choices about what kinds of human activity we want to prioritize.
Will we give U.S. tech giants first dibs on increasingly scarce water so they can continue pumping out AI slop 24/7/365? Or should we instead prioritize things like, say, food production?
Possibility #3: 20 million cubic metres of water is only for the data centres, and doesn't include any gas-fired power generation.
Even then, the math doesn't really work. Although the data centres themselves would consume less water than any gas plants built to power them, we estimate a water consumption of around 65 million cubic metres per year for the data centres alone.
Regardless, let's assume this is how they came up with their number: the data centres still need to get power from somewhere.
But from where? The already-strained Alberta grid?*
Possibility #4: The number is accurate, but only because the Wonder Valley project was always meant to be much smaller than O'Leary claimed.
In this scenario, the question becomes, "what size of data centre would consume 20 million cubic metres of water per year?" And the answer, based on the available water consumption statistics for AI data centres and gas-fired power generation, is a 1-gigawatt facility, give or take.
Again, to be clear: data centres on this "smaller" scale are still absolutely massive, and only a handful have even been built. It's just not quite as headline-grabbing as what O'Leary pitched.
More math, more problems
Another unanswered question: how much is this project actually supposed to cost? Recent reporting suggests the cost of a 1-gigawatt AI data centre is around $25 to $35 billion. Yet O'Leary is publicly pitching a $70B price tag for a project several times that size? Either costs have tripled in the last 18 months, or the Wonder Valley numbers were pulled out of thin air.
And lastly, according to an April 2025 email to Kyle Reiling from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (obtained last week through additional FOI requests made by Canada's National Observer), the federal regulator has only approved the annual diversion of 6 million cubic metres of water per year from the Smoky River, using a temporary, seasonally-installed pump, until 2033. In other words, just a quarter of the volume that folks at the GIG are still claiming the project has permission to use.
Interestingly, this very same email appeared in the earlier cache of documents released by the municipality, but had been fully redacted.
So what is Kevin O'Leary's real plan? It's still unclear. One thing's for sure: no one should trust a single word that comes out of his mouth.
* Part 2 of The Wonder Valley Files will look at the question of power generation.