Edmonton
Fur trade hub became provincial capital, then reinforcement learning birthplace. Trans Mountain expansion increased crude flows 450% in 2024; Richard Sutton won 2024 Turing Award. By 2026: testing whether AI researchers can industrialize what DeepMind left behind.
Edmonton exists because the North Saskatchewan River cuts through the prairie near the geographic center of Alberta. The valley's abundance of water, timber, and wildlife drew semi-nomadic hunters for at least 5,000 years before the Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company built competing forts here in 1795. After the companies merged in 1821, Fort Edmonton became the dominant hub of the western fur trade—the logistics center where pelts from across the northwest converged before shipping east.
The city's modern identity as Alberta's capital came through politics, not commerce. When Alberta joined Confederation in 1905, the capital question was contentious—Calgary was larger and more commercially powerful. But Edmonton won, and the University of Alberta followed in 1908. That academic foundation would prove decisive a century later. In 2017, when DeepMind opened its first research lab outside the UK, it chose Edmonton—not Toronto, not Montreal—because University of Alberta professors Richard Sutton, Michael Bowling, and Patrick Pilarski had pioneered reinforcement learning, the technique behind AlphaGo.
Today, Edmonton operates at the intersection of old and new Alberta. The Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, fully operational in May 2024, nearly tripled capacity from Edmonton to British Columbia's coast—pipeline movements of crude increased 450% in the following year. Alberta's oil and gas sector generates $88 billion in GDP, 25% of the provincial economy. But the city also hosts Amii, one of three federal AI centers of excellence, and Richard Sutton won the 2024 Turing Award for his work on reinforcement learning. Employment hit a record 850,000 in 2023, with GDP growth projected at 2.7% for 2025.
By 2026, Edmonton's dual identity will face a stress test. When DeepMind closed its Edmonton office in 2023, the researchers scattered into startups like RL Core Technologies—applying reinforcement learning to water treatment plants instead of games. Whether this pattern of fundamental research spinning into industrial application can sustain Edmonton's AI ecosystem will determine if the city remains relevant to both old energy and new.