Meta has broken ground on its first data center in Canada, a 1-gigawatt, AI-optimized facility in Sturgeon County, Alberta, the company announced this week. The project, backed by more than CAD $13 billion (roughly $9.2 billion) in investment, becomes Meta’s 33rd data center worldwide.
What the site will do
Meta says the Alberta facility will support AI workloads and the core products used by billions of people globally, part of a broader buildout of compute capacity the company has been racing to expand this year. The company says it is funding new power generation and grid infrastructure itself so the added electricity demand does not raise costs for other Alberta consumers, and it is separately putting about CAD $60 million into local roads and water infrastructure.
Jobs and water use
Construction is expected to employ up to 3,000 workers at peak, with more than 300 permanent roles once the site is operational. On cooling, Meta says the facility will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling that eliminates operational water use for cooling altogether, limiting on-site water use to domestic needs, fire safety and equipment maintenance — part of a company-wide pledge to be water positive by 2030.
Part of a bigger buildout
The Alberta project lands amid reports that Meta is aiming to roughly double its AI computing capacity by 2027, backed by newly signed long-term supply agreements with chipmakers including Samsung Electronics. Meta has not detailed a completion date for the Alberta site, but the groundbreaking marks the company’s first physical AI infrastructure investment in Canada.