🍜 Alberta is about to get more servers than stop..

Old tech is wobbling, a tiny Alberta town is about to get more servers than stop signs, and Ottawa just called OpenAI for a very serious chat...

February 24, 2026

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Old tech is wobbling, a tiny Alberta town is about to get more servers than stop signs, and Ottawa just called OpenAI for a very serious chat. Let’s lean in. IBM stock slid after Anthropic dropped yet another shiny AI tool. Every time a new model launches, somewhere a legacy tech executive refreshes the stock chart and whispers “this is fine.” The AI arms race is starting to look like musical chairs and someone forgot to sit down. 📉 Meanwhile, a ten billion dollar AI data centre is rising in small town Alberta. Population: quiet. New neighbors: thousands of humming GPUs that never sleep. It is giving “cornfields by day, compute fortress by night.” ⚡ And in a much heavier turn, Canada’s AI minister has summoned OpenAI after the Tumbler Ridge shooting. When governments start calling emergency meetings about chatbot safety, you know the stakes just jumped from tech drama to national concern. The room in Ottawa is probably very quiet. 🇨🇦 From market jitters to prairie megaprojects to serious questions about AI’s real world impact, the story is getting bigger and more complicated by the week. Let’s dig in.

In today’s AI digest:

  • IBM slides as Anthropic drops another disruptive AI tool 📉

  • A ten billion dollar AI data center rises in small town Alberta ⚡

  • Canada’s AI minister summons OpenAI after the Tumbler Ridge shooting 🇨🇦

Read time: 5 minutes

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(source: BusinessInsider)

📉 The Digest: IBM’s stock took a hit after Anthropic unveiled a new AI tool that can modernize ancient COBOL code faster than a consultant can say “digital transformation.” Investors suddenly realized that one of IBM’s most reliable revenue streams might now be getting audited by a chatbot.

Key Details:

đź–Ą COBOL Meets Claude
Anthropic’s tool can analyze and refactor decades old COBOL systems, the same ones quietly running banks, airlines, and governments. For years, fixing that code required a rare human who both understood it and still remembered what a floppy disk was. Now Claude shows up and finishes before lunch.

đź’Ľ Consulting Just Got Nervous
IBM has long made steady money helping clients modernize legacy systems. If AI can do a chunk of that work automatically, those premium billing hours start looking negotiable. Somewhere, a PowerPoint titled “Why Humans Still Matter” is being updated urgently.

📉 Market Reaction Was Swift
Shares dropped around 10 percent in a single session. Wall Street does not wait for proof. It hears “AI can automate” and immediately checks who is next on the chopping block.

⚡ Old Tech, New Threat
COBOL has survived recessions, tech bubbles, and the invention of the smartphone. It might finally meet its match in a model trained on half the internet and a lot of caffeine.

Why It Matters: This is the new AI pattern. A startup announces a feature, and a century old giant feels it in the stock chart. IBM is not going anywhere tomorrow, but the message is clear. In the AI era, even the oldest codebase can get a surprise visitor, and that visitor does not bill by the hour.

AI data center

(source: TheNarwhal)

⚡ The Digest: A 10 billion dollar AI data center is rising in Olds, Alberta, a town better known for farmland than fiber optics. Overnight, cows might become the second most powerful thing in the area. Silicon Valley energy, prairie edition.

Key Details:

🏗 From Tractors to Teraflops
The proposed one gigawatt facility would be one of the largest AI compute hubs in Canada. That is not just a warehouse. That is a digital furnace big enough to make Google Maps squint.

đź’Ľ Job Market Plot Twist
Thousands of construction roles and over a thousand long term tech jobs are on the table. Imagine telling your grandparents you work in AI infrastructure and they reply, “Is that near the grain elevator?”

⚡ Powering the Brain
To keep all those GPUs humming, the project may include its own natural gas power generation. Translation: the servers are so hungry they are bringing their own kitchen.

🏡 Small Town, Big Servers
Local reactions are mixed. Some see opportunity. Others see a mysterious humming building that uses more electricity than the entire county. Either way, Olds just became a dot on the global AI map.

Why It Matters: AI is no longer just a coastal tech story. It is moving into rural landscapes and rewriting local economies. When a small Alberta town starts hosting machines that train the world’s smartest models, you know the future does not care about your postal code.

OpenAI

(source: TheGlobeandMail)

🇨🇦 The Digest: Canada’s AI minister has summoned OpenAI to Ottawa after revelations that the suspect in the Tumbler Ridge shooting had previously been flagged by ChatGPT’s safety systems. Now the federal government wants to understand exactly what a “red flag” means if it does not lead anywhere. When tragedy meets technology, suddenly everyone wants the user manual.

Key Details:

đź“© A Flag Without a Whistle
OpenAI reportedly banned the individual’s account months before the shooting after disturbing content was detected. However, the case did not meet the internal threshold for alerting law enforcement. That decision is now under the microscope.

🏛 Emergency Meeting Mode
Canada’s AI minister called in senior OpenAI safety leaders for urgent talks. It is less a product demo and more a “walk us through your escalation flowchart” moment.

⚖️ Regulation Talk Heating Up
Ottawa has hinted that stronger oversight could be on the table if companies cannot clearly explain how safety signals translate into real world action. In politics, “we just want clarification” is often step one.

🧠 The Bigger Safety Question
AI systems can detect patterns and risky language, but deciding when that crosses into reportable threat territory is messy. Algorithms can flag content. Humans still have to interpret it.

Why It Matters: This situation highlights a tough reality. AI companies are expected to catch danger early, but they are not law enforcement agencies. Governments want stronger guardrails. Tech firms want clear rules. Meanwhile the public wants reassurance that warning signs do not disappear into a dashboard somewhere. In the AI era, even a chatbot’s moderation log can become part of a national conversation.

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