Overview
- Meta confirmed Wednesday that it will invest more than C$13 billion to build a 1‑gigawatt AI‑optimized data centre in Sturgeon County, its first in Canada and the largest outside the U.S.
- The campus will be served under a long‑term tolling deal with Project Greenlight, a new on‑site natural gas plant led by Pembina and partners that Meta will help fund, and the plant is slated to enter service in the second half of 2030.
- Alberta and Meta say the project will create over 3,000 construction jobs, roughly 300 permanent roles, deliver about C$250 million a year in royalties and taxes for the province, and include about C$60 million in local infrastructure spending.
- Meta says the site will use closed‑loop liquid cooling with dry cooling and will match its electricity use with renewable energy, but environmental groups and local critics have raised concerns about emissions, water, noise and a gap between the data centre’s target start and the plant’s 2030 in‑service date.
- The deal reflects Alberta’s ‘bring your own power’ approach and AESO’s willingness to allocate capacity to projects that secure their own generation, a model that speeds approvals but reshapes how grid reliability, emissions and community impact are managed.