Meta has unveiled plans for a $13 billion gigawatt-scale data centre campus to support AI workloads. The campus will be located in Sturgeon County, Alberta, 35 kilometres north of Edmonton. The project will be Canada’s largest data centre and the investment will be the largest private sector spend in the province’s history.
In addition to the $13 billion price tag to build the campus, an additional $4.6 billion is expected to be spent on a new gas-fired electricity generating plant to power it, a project being built by Pembina Pipeline, Kineticor Asset Management, and other project partners. The estimated costs do not include the additional costs related to the high-tech chips required to power these AI-focused facilities, which means the figure will be remarkably higher. According to a recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, for every $1 spent on data centre infrastructure, approximately 54 cents is allocated for computer chips.
“It’s our first in Canada. It’s also pretty unique in the sense that it’s a pretty large deployment—we’re looking at a one gigawatt-scale data centre development,” said Gary Demasi, Meta’s Vice President of Data Centre Strategy and Development.
The facility is the company’s thirty-third, will boast just under three million square feet of space, and will be “on par” with other large-scale projects Meta has announced this year in the United States.
Construction is expected to commence soon, though an official date has yet to be announced. The project timeline is expected to take a couple of years, as projects of this magnitude do.
The project, which will be fully funded by Meta, is expected to create 3,000 construction jobs and 300 operating jobs and will lead to an estimated $250 million in annual benefits for Alberta through taxes and increased natural gas royalties tied to power generation and industry levies. The province will also benefit from the company’s expenditure of $60 million in local infrastructure improvements required to support the facility.
While Alberta can guarantee the energy capacity required by the campus, which will use a combination of grid-connected power and new onsite gas-fired generation, Meta has a goal to match its energy consumption with clean energy and is seeking clean energy projects in the region as potential offsets. Meta will also pay about $100 million annually in transmission fees for its power draw.
The Pembina Pipelines, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, and Kineticor project is a $4.6 billion investment in a 932-megawatt gas-fired power generation facility that will be constructed in Sturgeon County. The Greenlight plant is expected to begin operations in the second half of 2030. The facility has approval from regulators to double capacity to more than 1,800 megawatts based on the understanding that it has the capacity to initiate more than $75 billion of total data centre-related capital spending over time.
The data centre will also require high-speed fibre connections into the United States, which the company plans to build.
The land that has been secured for the project is zoned heavy industrial and officials believe that there will be no disruption to residents in the area, though opposition to the project exists.
