Meta to build $13 billion AI data center in Alberta, its first in Canada

Meta will build a 1-gigawatt AI data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, the company’s first in Canada and, by its own account, its largest outside the United States. Meta puts the investment at more than CAD $13 billion, or roughly $9.2 billion in US dollars.

The company confirmed the project on Wednesday, July 8, at a Calgary news conference where Gary Demasi, Meta’s vice-president of data center strategy and development, appeared alongside Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

As reported by EnergyNow, Gary Demasi said:

The site sits about 35 kilometers north of Edmonton in the Alberta Industrial Heartland, a zone set aside for heavy industry. It will span roughly 2.9 million square feet and rank as Meta’s 33rd data center worldwide, joining a fleet that already includes facilities in Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, and Singapore.

Meta describes the campus as optimized for the AI workloads behind products used by billions of people. As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, the company plans to spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, nearly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025.

Alberta lands its biggest project since the oilsands era

Meta’s own newsroom lists about 3,000 construction workers at peak build and more than 300 permanent operational jobs, plus roughly CAD $60 million toward local roads and water infrastructure. Alberta’s government frames the payoff more broadly: an estimated $250 million a year in taxes, natural gas royalties, and industry levies, according to Culture Alberta and EnergyNow.

Technology Minister Nate Glubish tied the win to a deliberate campaign. He said he first pitched Meta’s data center team in Silicon Valley about two years ago, when the company had not considered the province. “It did not happen by accident. It happened by design,” Glubish said.

For scale, reports note the campus would be the largest capital project in the province since Suncor’s $17 billion Fort Hills oilsands mine. And the $13 billion figure covers the buildings, not the AI chips inside them. Carson Kearl, an analyst at Enverus, said the project could eventually drive more than $75 billion in total spending once chips and networking gear are counted.

Gas power becomes the key trade-off for Meta’s AI campus

The data center’s power will come from Alberta’s grid and a gas plant next door. That gas plant, called Greenlight Electricity Center, is a stand-alone $4.6 billion facility owned by Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor. Meta doesn’t own the plant, it just purchases the power it generates.

The announcement also solved a small mystery: when the Greenlight plant got its go-ahead on July 2, its backers would only describe the buyer as a single “major data center” customer, Culture Alberta reported. Meta is that customer. The plant is targeted to come online in the second half of 2030.

The facility would require about as much electricity as 800,000 homes would, having power of up to 970 megawatts from the grid, as well as up to 1,800 megawatts of onsite gas generation when fully built out, according to reports. That reliance on gas is key to the province’s argument, and it’s also a source of contention.

Alberta’s grid is far more carbon-intensive than Canada’s national average. Meta says it will match its electricity use with 100% clean and renewable energy and is screening clean-energy projects in the region to offset consumption.

The Pembina Institute, a clean-energy think tank unrelated to the pipeline company, warned that the added gas demand means household electricity costs will keep rising in the years ahead.

Glubish argued the reverse on transmission, saying Meta’s roughly $100 million a year in transmission fees would spread fixed costs across more users and cut other Albertans’ transmission charges by up to six percent.

Meta: “Dry cooling will limit water use”

Meta says that on water, the site will use a closed loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling, using no water at all for cooling purposes, as per its newsroom and CBC News.

On-site water use will be limited to domestic needs, fire safety, and equipment maintenance.

Meta has also pledged to be water positive by 2030 and, in Alberta, to help conserve 200 acres of grassland, trees, and wetlands in the North Saskatchewan River watershed.

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