Meta pitches $13B Alberta data centre as Canada’s largest

EDMONTON — Meta made its case Thursday for a $13 billion Sturgeon County data centre — billed as Canada’s largest — at the Alberta Industrial Heartland Association’s annual conference, with community engagement manager Matt Sexton joining Invest Alberta CEO Keith Bradley on stage.

The one-gigawatt campus is Meta’s first Canadian data centre and is slated to support about 3,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent roles once running. Sexton said the build would generate more than 25 million work hours and that Meta has already contracted much of the Alberta workforce, with supply-chain work stretching to Calgary. The company has pledged $60 million toward local infrastructure.

Power is a central risk. The site is expected to draw on natural gas from the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932-megawatt plant not due online until 2030. A Pembina Institute estimate has warned the data centre could lift Alberta household electricity costs by hundreds of dollars a year — even as Meta signs onto Ottawa’s non-binding responsible data-centre framework.

“It’s really incumbent on the company to be a part of the long-term solution to domesticate, and recruit and retain talent here,” Sexton said. For Alberta households and industry, the inflation question is whether cheap gas and big US tech capital arrive without locking in higher power bills for everyone else on the grid.