Meta said Wednesday it will invest more than $9.1 billion to build its first artificial intelligence data center in Canada, a facility the company says will be its largest outside the United States.
The 1-gigawatt campus will be built in Sturgeon County, Alberta, and will become Meta’s 33rd data center worldwide, joining existing international facilities in Sweden, Ireland, Denmark and Singapore. The site is designed to scale up to 1.8 gigawatts of capacity as AI demand grows, according to the company, with electricity consumption at full build-out equivalent to the power used by roughly 800,000 homes.
Meta said the facility will be powered by a natural gas-fired plant being developed by a consortium that includes Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Ltd. The company said it will fully fund the electricity infrastructure required to serve the site rather than passing costs on to other grid customers, and is separately investing in additional generation capacity and transmission upgrades intended to improve reliability across Alberta’s broader power system. Meta worked with several regional energy providers, including Greenlight Limited Partnership, AltaLink, Capital Power and the Alberta Electric System Operator, to plan for the facility’s power needs, the company said.
The data center will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system paired with dry cooling, which Meta said will not require operational water use, with any water consumption at the site limited to fire safety and domestic purposes. Rachel Peterson, Meta’s vice president of data centers, said the project reflects both the company’s AI expansion plans and a long-term commitment to the region. “I’m proud to add Canada to our global portfolio and even more proud to call Sturgeon County and Alberta home,” Peterson said.
Construction is expected to take two to three years. It will support more than 3,000 construction jobs at its peak, according to Meta, with roughly 300 permanent operational jobs once the facility is running. The company said it is separately paying $42.4 million toward local infrastructure upgrades in the area. Alberta’s Technology and Innovation Minister, Nate Glubish, called the project “a big deal for Alberta,” saying the province had built a regulatory framework specifically intended to attract large-scale data center investment.
The Alberta announcement comes as Meta plans to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on data centers and related infrastructure in its current fiscal year. The company has faced investor scrutiny over its ability to execute its broader AI roadmap after its Llama 4 models fell short of expectations last year, a shortfall Meta has since responded to by restructuring its AI efforts under a new unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which released its first model, Muse Spark, in April, followed by a second model, Muse Image, this week.
Meta is separately moving forward with plans to sell excess computing capacity to third-party customers, according to Bloomberg, a shift that would put the company in direct competition with hyperscale cloud providers including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as neocloud operators such as CoreWeave. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had previously flagged the idea during past earnings calls as a potential new revenue stream tied to the company’s expanding data center footprint.
