Meta breaks ground on Alberta data centre

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globalnews.ca

An artist’s rendition of the new $13 billion data centre that META says it will build in Sturgeon County, north of Edmonton. Source: META Platforms globalnews.ca

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META plans to build its new data centre in Sturgeon County, north of Edmonton, in an area known as Alberta’s Industrial Heartland. Source: META Platforms globalnews.ca

Click to play video: 'Wheatland County residents weigh in on proposed data centre at public hearing' globalnews.ca

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Meta and Alberta’s provincial government broke ground this week on a planned data centre in Sturgeon County north of Edmonton, a project Meta says will involve about $13 billion in spending. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith appeared alongside Meta’s vice-president of data centres, Gary Demasi, as the province pitched the facility as the company’s largest outside the United States, according to Global News.

The announcement ties together two of the most expensive parts of the current AI boom: computing hardware and the electricity to run it. Alberta is pairing the data centre with a newly announced natural gas-fired power project, Project Green Light, described as a 970-megawatt facility backed by Pembina Pipeline Corporation, Kineticor and Morgan Stanley infrastructure partners. The province says the combination will lower the transmission portion of electricity bills for ratepayers through a program it calls Project Green Light, while also drawing a new class of industrial customer whose demand is measured in city-scale loads.

For Meta, the attraction is not only power supply but predictability. A single hyperscale site locks in long-lived fixed costs—land, grid connections, cooling systems—while shifting operational risk onto local infrastructure and politics. Global News reports Meta says it will use a closed-loop water cooling system and limit on-site water use to domestic needs such as fire protection and maintenance. Those assurances are arriving alongside growing local pushback in Canada over water use, pollution, and the cost and availability of power when data centres cluster near communities that were not built around continuous, high-density industrial demand.

Alberta’s sales pitch is built around jobs and public revenue. Meta says the build will employ about 3,000 people at peak construction and about 300 full-time workers once operating. The provincial government says the project will generate roughly $250 million annually in royalties, taxes, levies and fees, and that Meta will spend about $60 million on local infrastructure improvements, including roads and water systems. Critics quoted by Global News focus less on the headline numbers than on the missing ones: how much capacity is effectively reserved for a single corporate tenant, what happens to prices when demand tightens, and which parts of the bargain are contractual versus political.

The project also illustrates a broader shift in how “AI investment” shows up on the ground. The spending is not just on software engineers and chips; it is on gas plants, transmission upgrades, roads, and water systems—assets that remain long after product cycles change. Greenpeace Canada’s Keith Stewart called for a moratorium on “megadata centres” until legislated environmental and human rights protections on AI are established, a demand that implicitly treats data centres as quasi-public infrastructure rather than private facilities.

Meta’s facility is being built in what Smith described as Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, an area designed for heavy industry for decades. The province is now asking households to see a social-media company’s power appetite as an electricity-bill benefit, not a competing claim on the grid.