Conor Chell on his role in Wonder Valley, the largest private infrastructure investment in Canadian history
Canada's ambitions for digital innovation and major infrastructure development rarely converge as visibly as they do in Wonder Valley. The proposed $70-billion AI data centre park in northern Alberta – described by its backers as the largest AI data centre industrial park in the world – sits at the intersection of two of the country's most urgent priorities: building domestic capability and accelerating infrastructure development. Managing the legal complexity of a project of that size requires a playbook that largely hasn't existed before.
Conor Chell is writing that playbook. A partner at KPMG Law LLP in Calgary, Alberta, and the firm's national leader for sustainability, environment and regulatory law, Chell is currently serving as acting general counsel for Wonder Valley – a role that has required assembling a legal and advisory structure as novel as the project itself.
A model built for major projects
KPMG Law operates as a standalone, independent national law firm associated with KPMG LLP. That structure allows the firm to deliver something a conventional law firm typically cannot. "We work hand in hand on the law side with our colleagues on the LLP side to deliver a variety of multidisciplinary services that are typically much broader in scope than you'd see from a standalone law firm," Chell says.
For the Wonder Valley AI data centre project, KPMG built what Chell calls a major projects delivery office – a joint effort between KPMG Law and the firm's advisory arm, covering regulatory, environmental, Indigenous, tax, corporate commercial, and real estate workstreams under a single structure.
His role goes well beyond external counsel. "As opposed to providing discrete legal advice on a particular topic, I'm overseeing the legal function for the entire project, and that includes development, construction, and into operations as well," he says. He reports directly to Wonder Valley's executive team, overseeing legal spend and providing strategic advice as the project advances. It resembles a secondment in time commitment, though Chell retains his partner role at KPMG Law and continues to serve other clients alongside this engagement.
A new regulatory category
The scale of Wonder Valley would make it legally complex regardless. But Chell says AI data centres also represent genuinely uncharted regulatory territory. "This sort of infrastructure, this type or category, is relatively new globally, but certainly in the Canadian context as well," he says. "It doesn't fit squarely into some of those boxes and processes."
Environmental compliance reflects that novelty. Chell has written about how companies should manage their risks and obligations on sustainability and ESG more generally. However, a project of this kind combines large power requirements with water, air emissions, noise, land and wetlands considerations, transmission infrastructure and data centre operations – components historically assessed separately, now requiring integration into a single coherent regulatory package. As a regulatory challenge, Chell says, “it's not how do we permit a power plant necessarily. It's how do we assess environmental requirements and impacts and how they interact across an integrated power and compute campus." AI infrastructure, he argues, is becoming its own major project regulatory category – distinct from conventional energy development.
Speed, consultation and the Building Canada Act
Chell welcomes the federal government's push to streamline approvals through the Building Canada Act, which came into force June 26, 2025 and creates an accelerated pathway for designated projects of national interest – but is clear-eyed about what it demands in practice. "What that requires in order to get a shorter approval window, or timeline, is a lot of work, much more work, I would say, on the front end," he says.
That front-end pressure falls especially hard on Indigenous engagement. "The starting point is always early, proactive, and ongoing engagement, ideally while the project is being designed so that you can still incorporate feedback and input from Indigenous communities," Chell says. For Wonder Valley, community engagement began before formal Crown consultation. Questions about approval durability – including how the legislation aligns with the duty to consult – remain open, Chell acknowledges, and have drawn significant commentary across the legal community.
The federal government introduced the concept of “coordinated consultation” as part of its Building Canada Strong Act, introduced September 21, 2026, to speed up Crown consultations, but the impact of these changes is yet to be seen.
What lawyers entering this work underestimate
As major project activity increases across Canada, and a computing infrastructure boom fuels a global M&A surge, Chell identifies two demands that lawyers consistently underestimate when working on similar large projects. The first is pace. Compressed regulatory timelines mean legal teams must "really respond in real time" – far more quickly than historical major project practice required.
The second is technical fluency. "You really need to have a deeper understanding of the technical side of things," he says. "Being able to work effectively and seamlessly and speak the language in many cases of your technical counterparts – whether that's engineers or geophysicists or water specialists or air emissions experts – being able to really understand what it is that they're telling you, being able to communicate that to your client and then ultimately to a regulator and the stakeholders and public at large," is a key skill that lawyers must put into practice if they want their project to succeed.
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