Meta Platforms unveiled its first Canadian hyperscale data centre on July 8, committing more than CA$13 billion to build a 1-gigawatt AI campus on 1,750 acres in Sturgeon County, Alberta, north of Edmonton. Once complete, the Sturgeon Data Centre will become Meta's single largest facility outside the United States and one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects ever announced in Canada.
A 1 GW Anchor for Alberta's Industrial Heartland
The campus is planned inside Alberta's Industrial Heartland, an industrially zoned area not used for farming, housing or food production. Meta says approximately 3,000 construction workers will be onsite at peak build-out and the facility will support more than 300 permanent jobs once operational. Alberta's provincial government estimates the project will generate roughly CA$250 million per year in taxes, royalties, levies and fees, on top of about CA$60 million Meta is spending on local road and water infrastructure upgrades.
Frost Collective, a joint venture between Clark Builders and PCL Construction, will act as general contractor on the mega-project.
Powering the Campus Without Squeezing Consumers
To feed the site, Meta has locked in years of planning with Greenlight Limited Partnership, Altalink, Capital Power and the Alberta Electric System Operator. The company says it will add enough new clean generation to match 100% of the electricity used by the Sturgeon Data Centre, pay the full costs of its power use, and fully fund the associated grid infrastructure so other consumers are not left with the bill. A separate 932 MW power project tied to the campus is expected to cost roughly CA$4.6 billion and start up in the second half of 2030.
Water, Sustainability and Community Grants
Meta is targeting water-positive operations by 2030 and says the Sturgeon site will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling, meaning no operational water use in the cooling loop itself. Annual operational water demand is projected to be less than a typical golf course or a 50-acre canola farm in the region. In parallel, Meta is partnering with ALUS to help farmers conserve 200 acres of grasslands, wetlands and trees inside the North Saskatchewan River watershed, and will launch its annual Data Centre Community Action Grants programme in the fall.
A Data-Centre Land Grab That Now Spans Three Continents
Sturgeon slots into a larger AI capacity build-out. Alberta becomes Meta's newest campus alongside the just-announced Microsoft-Chevron 2.67 GW Kilby project in Pecos, Airtrunk's $21B, 3 GW Maharashtra plan and Anthropic's $19B TeraWulf Kentucky lease. It also sits alongside Meta's earlier decision to rent out excess GPU capacity through a new Meta Compute cloud, an early sign that the company is now packaging its own capacity for external customers as it scales.
Reporting based on coverage from Meta Data Centers, The Globe and Mail, CTV News and Global News.