Meta is breaking ground on its first data center in Canada, a 1‑gigawatt, AI‑optimized facility in Sturgeon County, Alberta that will serve as a major hub for the company’s expanding artificial intelligence and core product infrastructure. The site is Meta’s 33rd data center globally and represents an investment of more than C$13 billion (about US$9.2 billion), making it one of the company’s largest projects outside the United States.
The Sturgeon County data center is designed to support Meta’s AI workloads, including the compute needed for services across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the company’s wearables and mixed reality products. At full buildout, the facility will have power capacity equivalent to hundreds of thousands of homes and is planned with scalability up to roughly 1.8 gigawatts.
Construction is expected to support more than 3,000 workers at peak, with over 300 long‑term operational jobs once the center is live. Meta also plans to invest around C$60 million in local infrastructure improvements, including roads and water systems, alongside grants and funding for local nonprofits.
The project will be powered primarily by a new natural gas‑fired plant, the Greenlight Electricity Centre, developed by a consortium including Pembina Pipeline, with Meta as the anchor customer. Meta has committed to matching all electricity consumption from the site with clean and renewable energy and will use a closed‑loop liquid cooling system that does not draw operational water from local sources.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re breaking ground on a new 1GW data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta — our first data center in Canada and 33rd in our global fleet. This data center will be optimized for our AI workloads, helping bring to life the technologies that billions around the world use to connect, find communities, grow businesses, and experience the power of our wearables.”[about.fb]
Meta blog post on its first Canadian data center
