Meta to build C$13 billion Alberta data centre, its first in Canada

Meta will build its first data centre in Canada, a 1-gigawatt campus in central Alberta that the company values at C$13 billion (about US$9 billion), extending the same relentless build-out that produced its $200 billion Hyperion campus in Louisiana.

The facility will rise in Sturgeon County, northeast of Edmonton, and become the company’s 33rd data centre worldwide.

Executives unveiled the project in Calgary on Wednesday alongside Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, whose government has spent years courting Silicon Valley in the hope of landing a marquee investment for the oil-and-gas province.

Meta described the site as its largest outside the United States, a claim that fits neatly with the surging capital budgets now reshaping the industry.

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The build is expected to take two to three years and to support more than 3,000 construction workers at its peak. Meta also pledged spending on local infrastructure and funding for area nonprofits, the kind of community package that has become standard for data-centre deals of this size, and a partial answer to the criticism that hyperscale campuses generate few permanent jobs once the concrete is poured.

Power is the harder problem, and it sits at the centre of the announcement. Once fully operational, the campus will draw roughly as much electricity as 800,000 homes, a load that has turned electricity supply into the defining constraint on new AI facilities everywhere.

To feed it, Meta has partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline, which said it will proceed with the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a natural-gas-fired generation plant in Sturgeon County.

Pembina expects the facility to enter service in late 2030, and the data centre is projected to consume about 150 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

That reliance on gas mirrors a wider pattern, from a Chevron gas deal powering a Texas campus to the turbine fleets Meta has lined up across the United States.

Cheap, abundant Alberta gas is a large part of why the province pitched itself so aggressively, though the late-2030 timing for the plant suggests the site will ramp up in phases.

For Meta, the Alberta campus is a relatively modest entry against a capital-expenditure budget that has climbed toward $145 billion for 2026.

The company has been racing to secure compute for its Superintelligence Labs effort, the division through which Mark Zuckerberg has framed his pursuit of what he calls personal superintelligence, while hunting for ways to defray the cost, including a plan to rent out spare capacity to other firms.

Provincial officials framed the deal in superlatives. Sturgeon County called it the largest private investment in its history, and Smith has tied Alberta’s economic pitch to plentiful energy and a lighter regulatory touch than neighbouring jurisdictions, positioning the province as a landing spot for compute-hungry tech giants.

The economics are also part of a global surge in grid spending, with utilities committing more than a trillion dollars to keep pace with AI demand through the end of the decade.

Questions about water use and strain on the local grid, the two issues that have dogged data-centre projects from Utah to Louisiana, remain largely unanswered for the Alberta site.

Meta has said it will share more detail on the campus’s design and environmental footprint as planning advances, and provincial regulators will have to sign off before the Greenlight plant is built. For now, the first phase sits years away, with the natural-gas facility not due until late 2030.

Whether Alberta’s long courtship pays off will depend on how quickly Meta scales the site and whether the promised jobs and local spending arrive on the schedule officials laid out on Wednesday.

For a province that has staked its economic future on selling energy, a hyperscaler willing to burn its gas by the pipeline-load is close to an ideal customer.