Meta to build $13B AI data centre in Alberta

CALGARY – Meta plans to spend more than $13 billion to build a massive artificial intelligence data centre in Sturgeon County, north of Edmonton, marking the technology company’s first such facility in Canada.

Meta described the data centre in a news release last week as a 1-gigawatt facility, referring to the amount of electricity it will consume. For comparison, the city of Edmonton draws about 1.4 gigawatts.

The data centre campus will be built on 1,750 acres of land, according to a company spokesperson, well over the size of Stanley Park in Vancouver. The project’s energy consumption will dwarf recently announced data centre plans from Bell Canada and Telus Corp.

To meet the electricity needs of the data centre, Pembina Pipeline Corp., Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management are building a $4.6-billion natural gas plant in Sturgeon County. Dubbed the Greenlight Electricity Centre, the project was first announced last year, with Pembina and its partners saying the plant would serve an unnamed data centre customer.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, did not publicly confirm its involvement until last week.

The Globe and Mail noted that Alberta’s government has been courting big tech companies for the past couple of years, touting the province’s ample natural gas resources as a way to quickly power energy-hungry data centres.

Demand for these facilities, which are large buildings filled with computing equipment for building and running AI models, has been booming amid growing AI development and adoption.

But data centres are proving controversial in many municipalities, as residents question the economic benefits, environmental impacts and the lack of transparency around some of these developments.

The Greenlight power facility in Sturgeon County will provide 932 megawatts of electricity at first and has the potential to expand to more than 1.8 gigawatts (or 1,800 megawatts) in the future.

Capital Power in Edmonton also said Wednesday that it has signed an energy supply agreement with Meta spanning more than 10 years for 250 megawatts of electricity.

Meta said the facility will employ more than 3,000 workers at the peak of construction and provide more than 300 jobs once operational in two to three years. The company is promising to cover the full electricity costs of the data centre, including for new and upgraded infrastructure.

It will use an efficient cooling system to reduce water use, the company said, adding that water consumption will be limited to fire safety and equipment maintenance.

The facility’s water use will be “less than a typical Alberta golf course,” said Gary Demasi, vice-president of data centre strategy at Meta, at a news conference in Calgary. (The power plants that provide electricity to data centres also consume water, however.)

Mr. Demasi credited provincial Technology Minister Nate Glubish for “putting Alberta on our radar.”

Alberta premier Danielle Smith (pictured) said at the news conference that the development will bring economic benefits through royalties and taxes. “Alberta is the ideal North American spot for data centres,” she said, pointing to the province’s power-generation capabilities and cool climate. She added that Meta’s data centre will be located in an industrial zone that is not used for farming or residential housing.

Meta, which got its start in social media, is now among the largest developers of AI, and spending big on the infrastructure to power it. The company said earlier this year that its capital expenditures in 2026 will total between US$125-billion and US$145 billion, while chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has spent lavishly to recruit AI researchers to its Meta Superintelligence Labs division.

Much of the data centre construction is occurring in the United States. Around 70 data centre proposals have been announced in Canada since 2024, but only a handful have started construction, according to data from Aterio, a Vancouver-based company that tracks the industry.

Bell is building a 300-megawatt data centre campus in Saskatchewan, while Telus is constructing two in Vancouver, including a 100-megawatt facility.

Source: The Globe and Mail