Meta will build its first Canadian data center in Alberta’s Sturgeon County, a 1-gigawatt facility carrying a C$13 billion price tag. The project marks the company’s 33rd data center globally and leans on the province’s cheap natural gas to power its AI expansion.
Meta will build a 1-gigawatt data center in central Alberta, its first in Canada, as the company races to add computing capacity for the global AI boom. The facility lands in Sturgeon County and represents a C$13 billion, or $9.17 billion, investment, according to Meta.
The announcement follows Meta doubling down on AI, having pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for large AI data centers in the U.S. This site becomes the company’s 33rd data center globally.
Why Alberta won the project
Executives unveiled the plan in Calgary alongside Premier Danielle Smith and other Alberta officials, who have courted Silicon Valley for years. The pitch centers on power. Meta, like its peers, faces rapidly growing electricity demand from AI, and Alberta sells natural gas at a significant discount to the U.S. benchmark.
The province’s cold climate also cuts the cost of cooling the machines. Alberta already hosts 20 small- to mid-scale data centers drawing from a grid that is 60% powered by natural gas, and the government now lets new entrants build their own generation to sidestep capacity limits.
Powering the build-out
Meta said it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure for the site, which will consume roughly as much electricity as 800,000 homes. To supply it, the company partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline, whose Greenlight Electricity Centre is due in service in late 2030 under a long-term tolling agreement. The gas-fired plant will need about 150 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, Pembina said, feeding demand for Western Canadian producers.
That reliance carries a trade-off. The vast majority of data centers now planned in Canada sit in Alberta, where the grid’s emissions intensity runs almost five times the national average because of its dependence on gas.
Source: Reuters
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