Tech giant Meta announced Wednesday it will build a massive data center in central Alberta, the company’s first in Canada, as it rapidly builds out computing capacity to support the global AI boom.
The 1-gigawatt data center will be located in Sturgeon County and represents a total investment of C$13 billion, or $9.17 billion, Meta said. Meta has doubled down on AI, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to build large AI data centers in the U.S. The Alberta announcement represents the company’s 33rd data center globally. Executives made the announcement in Calgary alongside Premier Danielle Smith and other Alberta government officials, who have spent several years courting Silicon Valley tech giants with the aim of spurring a large-scale investment in the oil-and-gas province.
Meta, like other tech giants, is facing rapidly expanding power needs due to the growth of AI, and Alberta is rich in natural gas which sells at a significant discount to the U.S. benchmark.
The province’s cold climate also makes cooling the massive super-computers and related data center infrastructure more cost-efficient.
The 20 existing small- to mid-scale data centers in Alberta already pull from the province’s energy grid, which is 60% powered by natural gas. The provincial government is giving new proponents the option to build their own power sources to avoid limits on power capacity.
Meta said Wednesday it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure for its Alberta data center, which will consume about as much electricity as 800,000 homes. The company has partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline, which announced last week it will go ahead with its Greenlight Electricity Centre, a new natural gas-fired power-generation facility in Sturgeon County which will be in service in late 2030 and with which Meta has a long-term tolling agreement.
The project will require approximately 150 million cubic feet per day of natural gas, according to Pembina, helping to create demand for Western Canadian natural gas producers. Canada’s government laid out an AI strategy last month that suggested new data center growth would benefit from the country’s clean electricity grid, which is largely powered by renewables and low-emission power sources.
But the vast majority of data centers currently in the planning stages in Canada are located in Alberta, where a reliance on natural gas means the emissions intensity of the province’s electricity grid is almost five times the national average.
(Reporting by Amanda Stephenson in Calgary Editing by Nick Zieminski)