Meta Picks Alberta for First Canadian Data Centre, a C$13 Billion Bet on Cheap Gas and Cold Air

Meta announced Wednesday that it will build a C$13 billion data centre in central Alberta, the company's first in Canada, as it races to secure the physical footprint needed to support an expanding portfolio of AI services.

The 1-gigawatt facility, designed to scale up to 1.8 gigawatts, will sit in Sturgeon County and draw roughly as much electricity as 800,000 homes. Meta executives made the announcement in Calgary alongside Premier Danielle Smith and other provincial officials, who have spent years pitching Alberta to Silicon Valley as a destination where cheap natural gas and a cold climate make the economics of hyperscale computing hard to beat. Technology Minister Nate Glubish told reporters there are several other gigawatt-scale data centre proposals in various stages of development across the province. "This is the first of its kind, the first of its size, the first of its scale, but it won't be the last," he said.

Meta is not asking the provincial grid to absorb the load. The company said it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure for the site. Pembina Pipeline announced last week that it is proceeding with the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a new natural gas-fired power facility in Sturgeon County that will serve the data centre under a long-term tolling agreement and is expected in service by late 2030. Until then, Capital Power will supply 250 megawatts from its existing gas-fired fleet. Pembina estimates the project will consume about 150 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

Gary Demasi, Meta's vice president for data centre development, said the company will offset the electricity use by investing in clean and renewable energy and that the campus will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system, keeping total water consumption below that of a typical golf course.

The location exposes a tension in Canada's AI strategy. The federal government laid out a plan last month that framed new data centre growth as a beneficiary of the country's clean electricity grid. But most of the data centres currently in the planning stages are concentrated in Alberta, where the grid's emissions intensity runs almost five times the national average. Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada called for a moratorium on mega-data centres "until we have legislated environmental and human rights protections on AI," arguing that tech billionaires should not have unfettered access to the country's natural resources.

BuiltWorld AI Operational Take: Meta's decision to self-fund generation in Alberta confirms that the hyperscale playbook has shifted from "find clean power" to "build your own power and then offset it." The operational risk for teams mapping Canadian expansion is not just interconnection timelines but the growing gap between federal clean-energy messaging and provincial gas-dependent realities. Projects in Alberta will need to price in environmental opposition as a hard cost, because a moratorium campaign that gains political traction can delay a C$13 billion campus just as effectively as a failed turbine delivery.