Meta Breaks Ground on a $13 Billion Data Center in Alberta

Meta has started building its first data center in Canada, a sprawling AI facility in Sturgeon County, Alberta, that the company says will cost more than CAD $13 billion. It is the largest Meta has ever built outside the United States and the 33rd in its global fleet. Ground broke the week of July 9, with roughly 3,000 workers expected on site at the peak of construction and more than 300 permanent jobs once it opens.

The plant is built for one job: training and running the enormous models behind Meta's AI ambitions. It is rated at a full gigawatt of capacity, a figure that used to describe a mid-sized power station rather than a single computing site. Meta says the electricity will be matched entirely by clean and renewable sources, and that the cooling system will run on a closed loop with dry cooling that draws no water for day-to-day operation. That last detail is pointed, given how much of the backlash against data centers has focused on water.

A bet placed at the top of the market

The Alberta project fits a pattern. Meta has spent the past year converting cash into compute at a pace that has unsettled some of its own investors. The company has floated plans to rent out spare capacity to defray the cost, and it is not alone. The hyperscalers are collectively pouring hundreds of billions into infrastructure on the belief that demand will catch up with supply.

Not everyone is convinced the timing is sound. Treasury Department analysts recently warned of an AI bubble, and Nvidia's decision to push its next rack system to 2028 suggested that even the picks-and-shovels supplier sees a lull ahead. A $13 billion facility with a multi-year build is a wager that the boom has further to run.

Why Alberta

The location is no accident. Alberta offers cold weather that cuts cooling costs, cheap land, and a provincial government eager for the investment. Meta is putting about CAD $60 million into local roads and water infrastructure and reviving its community grant program in the area, the kind of sweetener that has become standard as towns grow warier of hosting these plants.

That wariness is the backdrop to the whole announcement. Even as Meta digs in Alberta, communities across the United States have organised to keep facilities like it out, a story we cover separately. Meta's willingness to build across the border, with the water and power questions answered up front, looks like a company that has read the room.