ai is eyeing the slope

One of the country's biggest data centers could land on the Slope.

A company wants to drop a massive data center onto Alaska's North Slope, and the price tag sits around half a billion dollars. We're talking a full square mile of buildings, way out past where the Dalton Highway traffic thins out. It'd sit roughly 25 miles south of the main oil patch, pretty much in the middle of the tundra.

The whole thing would run on its own natural gas power plant, fed by a brand new pipeline. By one estimate, it could burn more than double the gas all our cities use for power and heat combined. Let that sink in, one site pulling more energy than most of Alaska's homes put together.

There's a reason Alaska keeps coming up for this stuff: cheap land, gas right there in the ground, and the cold. Down in the Lower 48, these data centers drink up huge amounts of water to keep their servers from overheating. Up here, the cold air handles a lot of that cooling for free, so it leans on the weather instead of the water.

And it's not the only one, the military's floating its own data center plans on bases near Anchorage and Fairbanks. For us down in the cities, the real question is what all this does to our own energy. Our gas in Cook Inlet is already running tight, and everybody's watching where the next supply ends up.

A project this size could mean real jobs up north, plus a reason to finally build out more gas. If you work the Slope, or anything tied to oil and gas, this is worth a text to your crew. And the state's taking public comment on it through the middle of June, so nothing's locked in just yet.