Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation is celebrating a court ruling it considers a win in an ongoing legal battle with a celebrity-backed artificial intelligence data centre in northern Alberta. Canadian millionaire Kevin O’Leary’s group, O’Leary Digital, is behind the Wonder Valley project that would put a multi-billion-dollar AI data centre in the Greenview Industrial Gateway, a heavy eco-industrial site northwest of Edmonton and south of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. The First Nation filed for a review of the provincial water licence granted to O’Leary’s group. Their lawyers say the provincial government had a duty to consult with First Nations before any such licence was granted. O’Leary’s group moved to dismiss the review. On Thursday, a Court of King’s Bench judge ruled in favour of Sturgeon Lake, ultimately deciding O’Leary Digital would not be sufficiently directly affected by a review of the provincial water licence. Said licence was granted by the Alberta government in April 2025 to the Municipal District of Greenview under the provincial Water Act. It allows for the diversion of six million cubic metres of water from the nearby Smoky River for the future centre. Smoky River is near Treaty 8 reserve lands, where Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation “exercise their traditional Treaty and Aboriginal rights,” according to the court decision document. “Today’s decision means O’Leary’s group lost on every ground. This means that SLCN’s judicial review of the Water Act licence, including a challenge to Alberta’s failure to consult at all, will go ahead in December,” the First Nation said in a statement Thursday. O’Leary Digital did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
