Meta said Wednesday it will spend more than $9.1 billion to build its first data center in Canada, a 1-gigawatt facility in Sturgeon County, Alberta, that will draw electricity from a purpose-built 932-megawatt natural gas plant scheduled to come online in the second half of 2030.
The Sturgeon County site is Meta's 33rd data center and its largest outside the United States. It hitches the world's largest social-media company to a dedicated fossil-fueled power supply at a moment when hyperscalers face mounting scrutiny over the strain their artificial-intelligence facilities place on public electricity grids.
The power deal
The generating plant, called the Greenlight Electricity Center, will be developed by a consortium of Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Ltd., Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management. The three firms announced last week that they would proceed with construction. Meta was identified Wednesday as the customer.
Alberta's electricity grid cannot support multiple large AI data centers, and the province is now prioritizing projects that build or secure their own power generation. Meta said it worked with Greenlight Limited Partnership, Altalink, Capital Power and the Alberta Electric System Operator "to plan for and meet our energy needs years in advance of this data center coming online."
Nate Glubish, Alberta's technology and innovation minister, called the project "a big deal for Alberta," saying the province had built a regulatory framework designed to attract data-center investment.
Water and jobs
Meta said the facility will use a closed-loop cooling system that will not draw from surrounding water sources, and pledged $42 million for local roads and water infrastructure. Construction will support more than 3,000 workers at its peak and take two to three years, the company said.
"This specific location met the factors we typically look for: good access to infrastructure, a robust electric grid and access to energy, a strong pool of talent, and a great set of community partners that helped us move this project forward," a Meta spokesperson said.
The Meta Compute question
The Alberta build is part of an aggressive capital-expenditure program Meta has forecast at as much as $145 billion this year. The company is simultaneously planning a new cloud-computing business that could sell excess data-center capacity to third parties or provide paid access to AI models running on its infrastructure, a direct challenge to the hyperscaler cloud franchises of Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon.
Meta trails the acknowledged leaders in frontier AI models, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and has yet to demonstrate a revenue path outside online advertising. Its shares are down about 9 percent this year while the Nasdaq Composite has gained 11 percent.
What's missing
Wednesday's wire and business reporting on the announcement did not include Alberta community groups or environmental critics. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. flagged the emissions, water use and noise from large data centers in a June investigation, but no local voices reached the day's dispatches. Investor skepticism of Meta's $145 billion spending plan, reflected in the stock's 20-point year-to-date underperformance against the Nasdaq, is also unaddressed in the company's Wednesday blog post.
The Greenlight Electricity Center is expected to begin operating in the second half of 2030.