Meta Platforms Inc. META-Q -2.11%decreaseplans to spend more than $13-billion to build a massive artificial intelligence data centre in Sturgeon County, Alta., north of Edmonton, marking the technology company’s first such facility in Canada.
Meta described the data centre in a news release 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.
To meet the electricity needs of the data centre, Pembina Pipeline Corp., Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management are constructing 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 Wednesday.
The company the data centre will employ more than 3,000 workers at the peak of construction and more than 300 jobs once operational in two to three years. Meta 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.
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.
Growing AI adoption and development is leading to unprecedented demand for new data centres, which are large facilities filled with sophisticated computer chips to build and run AI models. Much of the 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 Canada is building a 300-megawatt data centre campus in Saskatchewan, while Telus Corp. is constructing two in Vancouver, including a 100-megawatt facility.
The Alberta government, meanwhile, has been courting tech companies the past couple of years and pitching the province’s abundant natural gas resources as a way to power energy-hungry data centres. Rather than rely exclusively on electricity from the provincial grid, which could compromise reliability and raise prices for consumers, developers are encouraged to build their own power generation capacity.
Pembina has said that the Greenlight power facility will be operational in the second half of 2030, while Meta aims to have its data centre online sooner. To bridge the gap, the Alberta Electric System Operator, which manages the grid, last year allocated more than 900 megawatts of electricity to the Greenlight proponents, allowing the data centre to get online beforehand.
AESO is proposing to allot a further 1.6 gigawatts of electricity to developers building their own power generation facilities so that data centres can become operational beforehand.
Some data centre proposals have run into trouble. The Alberta Utilities Commission rejected an application for a massive development in the town of Olds earlier this year filed by Synapse Real Estate Corp. for containing “significant deficiencies.” The company reapplied, but the commission is still seeking more information from Synapse. Some residents have been vocal in opposing the project, too.
Indeed, data centre proposals have been met with community resistance in other parts of the country, as some Canadians are concerned about the environmental impact of these facilities, as well as the noise they can generate. In June, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew shot down a large-scale data centre planned for an area southeast of Winnipeg. “There’s a big threat to the environment and not much benefit to the economy,” he said at the time.
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