The Meta Alberta data center marks the tech giant’s first foray into Canada, with the company announcing plans Wednesday to build a massive facility in the heart of the province as it races to expand computing capacity for the global AI boom.

A Major Investment

The 1-gigawatt data center, designed with the ability to scale up to 1.8 gigawatts, will rise in Sturgeon County in central Alberta and represents a total investment of C$13 billion, or roughly $9.17 billion, according to Meta.

The move fits into the company’s broader, aggressive push into artificial intelligence, having already pledged hundreds of billions of dollars toward large AI data centers in the United States. The Alberta project becomes Meta’s 33rd data center worldwide.

Executives unveiled the plan in Calgary alongside Premier Danielle Smith and other provincial officials, who have spent years courting Silicon Valley in hopes of drawing large-scale investment to the oil-and-gas province.

More to Come

Alberta’s leaders made clear they see this as just the beginning. Technology Minister Nate Glubish told reporters that several other gigawatt-scale data center proposals are already at various stages of development across the province.

Glubish framed the announcement as historic while signaling it wouldn’t be the last of its kind, describing it as the first of its size and scale but far from the final one.

Why Alberta?

The province offered Meta a compelling pitch built on two key advantages:

• Cheap natural gas, which sells at a significant discount to the US benchmark, helping meet the enormous power demands driven by AI growth.
• A cold climate, which makes cooling the massive supercomputers and related infrastructure more cost-efficient.

Powering the Facility

Meeting the facility’s energy needs required a carefully layered arrangement. Meta has partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline, which announced last week that it would proceed with its Greenlight Electricity Centre, a new natural gas-fired power plant in Sturgeon County set to enter service in late 2030. Meta holds a long-term tolling agreement tied to that project.

In the meantime, and for the next decade, Alberta power producer Capital Power will supply 250 megawatts of electricity to the site using its existing natural gas-fired fleet.

The scale of consumption is striking. Meta said it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure for the data center, which will use about as much electricity as 800,000 homes. According to Pembina, the project will require roughly 150 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, creating fresh demand for Western Canadian gas producers.

Environmental Questions

Meta sought to address sustainability concerns head-on. Gary Demasi, the company’s vice president for data center development, said Meta would offset its electricity use by investing in clean and renewable energy. He also noted the facility would rely on a closed-loop liquid cooling system, meaning its total water use would fall below that of a typical golf course.

Still, the project sits at the center of a broader tension. Canada’s government rolled out an AI strategy last month suggesting that new data center growth would benefit from the country’s largely clean, renewable-powered grid. Yet most of the data centers currently in planning are concentrated in Alberta, where heavy reliance on natural gas leaves the provincial grid’s emissions intensity nearly five times the national average. Alberta’s grid is currently about 60% powered by natural gas, and the province is now allowing new developers to build their own power sources to sidestep limits on grid capacity.

Environmentalists were quick to push back. Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada argued that tech billionaires have no claim to the country’s natural resources, calling for a moratorium on mega-data centers until legislated environmental and human rights protections around AI are in place.

As Alberta positions itself as a magnet for AI infrastructure, Meta’s arrival is likely to intensify both the economic enthusiasm and the environmental debate surrounding the province’s data center ambitions.