Key Points
- Meta will build a C$13 billion (~$9.2 billion) data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta.
- It is Meta's first data center in Canada and its 33rd worldwide.
- The site starts at 1 gigawatt and can scale to 1.8 gigawatts.
- It feeds Meta's plan for 7 GW online in 2026 and 14 GW by 2027.
Meta will build its first Canadian data center in Sturgeon County, in central Alberta, a project it values at C$13 billion (about $9.2 billion), the company announced on July 8, 2026. The facility will come online at more than one gigawatt of capacity and is designed to scale to 1.8 gigawatts, making it one of the largest single sites in a global fleet that now numbers 33 locations, according to Yahoo Finance.
The choice of Alberta is the tell. The province sits on abundant natural gas and a deregulated power market, which lets a buyer the size of Meta strike long-term energy deals and get generation built faster than the grid queues in Virginia or Ohio would allow. Meta is not going to Sturgeon County for the labor market or the fiber; it is going for the electrons. That is the shape of the whole build-out now, as energy-trade outlet E&E News has tracked: the constraint on training the next model is no longer chips or land but power, and the map of where AI infrastructure lands is being redrawn around whoever can sell a gigawatt cheapest and soonest.
The Alberta plant is one piece of a plan to bring seven gigawatts of computing online in 2026 and roughly double that to 14 gigawatts by 2027, against a 2026 capital-expenditure budget that Meta has guided as high as $145 billion. The company is attacking that bill from both ends: cheaper power on one side and cheaper silicon on the other, having just moved its in-house Iris AI chip into manufacturing for September as part of the four-generation MTIA silicon roadmap it built with Broadcom. Owning the chip trims the cost per computation; owning the power contract trims the cost of running it.
It also puts Meta deeper into the spending race that has the four U.S. hyperscalers on track to spend $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year with no agreed definition of enough. A single C$13 billion facility that most people will never see is now a routine line item — and Alberta, not Silicon Valley, is where this one gets poured.
Source: Yahoo Finance, E&E News.
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