An application to build a 1.4GW gas-fired power plant for a data center campus in the central Alberta city of Olds has been rejected by the Canadian province’s utilities commission.

The project, proposed by Synapse Data Center Inc., would comprise ten 100MW buildings and offer around two million sq ft (185,805 sqm) of space. It could see investments totaling CA$10 billion (US$7.3bn), but there were no details of how it would be funded.

If built, it would be the company’s first data center.

But the Alberta Utilities Commission has “determined that it will not continue to process” Synapse’s proposal to construct a 1.4GW natural gas-fired power plant that would be used to supply energy to the data center.

This was because of “errors, insufficient or incomplete information, and internal inconsistency among the application documents” that created a “significant lack of clarity as to whether application requirements have been met.”

As laid out by the commission’s letter dated March 6, these documents include the information package accompanying a mandatory public outreach initiative, which lacked requisite detail and information about the data center, as well as the environmental evaluation, which was a “draft document with missing information.”

The commission also noted that there were inconsistencies between the documents that were submitted, and that it failed to provide a justification for why the data center project did not fall under the umbrella of certain legislation.

But the letter stated that the application had been closed “without prejudice to Synapse reapplying in the future.”

Synapse will likely re-apply, but the commission’s rejection will delay the project’s timeline, which originally estimated that the campus’ first phase could be ready by mid-2026.

Some Alberta residents oppose the construction of large-scale data centers in the province, and a petition, titled ‘Say NO to Data Centers in Alberta,’ has gathered more than 3,150 signatures at the time of writing.

Synapse’s proposed facility in Olds is explicitly mentioned in the text of the petition, along with O’Leary Ventures’ proposal for a 7.5GW ‘Wonder Valley’ campus

Olds is a town in central Alberta within Mountain View County. It is approximately 61km (38 miles) south of Red Deer and 90km (56 miles) north of Calgary.

Synapse was founded late last year by CEO Jason van Gaal. Van Gaal was the founder of Root Data Centers, which was acquired by Compass Datacenters in 2019.