Meta is making its largest Canadian investment to date, announcing plans to build a more than $13-billion artificial intelligence data centre in Sturgeon County, just north of Edmonton.

The facility will be Meta's first data centre in Canada and its 33rd globally. Designed specifically to support the company's growing AI operations, the campus will initially have one gigawatt of computing capacity with the potential to expand to 1.8 gigawatts in the future. That amount of electricity is roughly equivalent to the power consumption of hundreds of thousands of homes.

Construction is expected to create more than 3,000 jobs at its peak, while the completed facility will employ more than 300 permanent workers. Meta also plans to invest approximately US$42 million (about C$60 million) in local infrastructure, including roads and water systems.

The announcement marks a significant win for Alberta, which has spent the past year aggressively marketing itself as a destination for AI infrastructure. The province points to abundant natural gas, a relatively cool climate that reduces cooling costs and available industrial land as key competitive advantages. Alberta has also introduced a strategy specifically aimed at attracting AI data centre investment while requiring large projects to secure or build their own electricity generation.

To meet the project's enormous energy needs, Meta will rely on a new natural gas-fired power plant being developed through a partnership involving Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management. Capital Power will provide electricity until the new generation facility is completed, which is expected in 2030. Meta says it will fund the additional power generation and related electrical infrastructure.

The company says the Alberta facility will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system with dry cooling technology, reducing the need for a continuous supply of water. That design is intended to address concerns over the significant water demands often associated with large AI data centres.

The investment reflects a global race among technology companies to build computing infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly powerful artificial intelligence models. Companies including Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have announced tens of billions of dollars in spending on new AI infrastructure as demand for computing power continues to accelerate.

Not everyone views the project positively. Environmental organizations have questioned Alberta's strategy of powering many AI facilities with natural gas, arguing the province's electricity grid has a higher carbon intensity than many other jurisdictions. Critics have also raised concerns about future electricity demand as more large-scale AI projects seek approval.

The Meta project follows several other proposed hyperscale AI developments in Alberta, reinforcing the province's emergence as one of North America's fastest-growing destinations for AI infrastructure. Industry analysts say Alberta's combination of energy resources, land availability and supportive government policy has made it increasingly attractive to global technology companies despite ongoing debate over environmental impacts.