Meta is building its first Canadian data center in Alberta, a C$13 billion ($9.17 billion) AI facility that will draw power from a dedicated natural gas plant, the company confirmed Wednesday. The 1-gigawatt campus in Sturgeon County, about 35 kilometers north of Edmonton, is Meta's 33rd data center globally and its largest outside the U.S. It will span roughly 2.9 million square feet, putting it on par with projects Meta announced this year in Indiana and Texas, according to Gary Demasi, Meta's vice president of data center strategy and development.
"This specific location met the factors we typically look for: good access to infrastructure, a strong electric grid and access to energy," a Meta spokesperson said. The announcement quietly solved a week-old mystery. On July 2, Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline and its partners greenlit the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a $4.6 billion natural gas-fired power plant in Sturgeon County built to supply a single "major data center" customer.
None of the companies would name that customer at the time. Meta's reveal confirms it was the buyer all along.
Meta will consume roughly as much electricity as 800,000 homes, requiring about 150 million cubic feet per day of natural gas, according to Pembina. The company said it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure, pairing 970 megawatts of grid-connected electricity with onsite gas-fired generation that can supply up to 1,800 megawatts at full buildout. The project lands in the middle of a brewing tension over Canada's AI infrastructure strategy.
The federal government laid out an AI strategy last month suggesting new data center growth would benefit from the country's clean electricity grid, which is largely powered by renewables. But the vast majority of data centers currently in the planning stages are in Alberta, where natural gas supplies 60% of the grid and the emissions intensity is nearly five times the national average.
Meta says it aims to match all its energy use with clean power and is screening potential clean-energy projects in the region to offset the center's consumption. The facility will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system that recirculates water rather than drawing new supply.
Alberta Technology Minister Nate Glubish said it will use less water in a year than a typical regional golf course. The project will support over 3,000 construction workers at its peak and 300 permanent operating positions. Meta will also spend about $60 million on local infrastructure improvements and build its own high-speed fiber connections into the United States.
The economic stakes are high for Alberta. The development is projected to generate an estimated $250 million a year through taxes, natural gas royalties tied to power generation, and industry levies.
Glubish called it "a vote of confidence to demonstrate that, yes, you can build gigawatt-scale infrastructure in Alberta." But the environmental questions are equally large.
The Pembina Institute, a clean-energy think tank, warned that adding a plant generating enough electricity to power a city two-thirds the size of Calgary will drive up household electricity costs. The province counters that Meta will pay roughly $100 million a year in transmission fees, which could lower other Albertans' transmission charges by up to six percent.
Meta's stock is down about 9% this year, and investors have been skeptical of the company's forecast for up to $145 billion in capital expenditures. The company has fallen behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in AI model leadership and hasn't shown a clear path to revenue outside online ads.
Yet it continues building: the Alberta Electric System Operator now has 41 data center projects representing 19.5 gigawatts of potential load in its connection queue, up from five gigawatts in early 2024.
Construction begins shortly, with a two-to-three year timeline. "This will be the first domino of many to fall," Glubish said.
