STURGEON COUNTY, Alta. - Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is building a data centre campus worth more than $13 billion in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, its first data centre in Canada and its largest outside the United States, and the project’s appetite for electricity has put it at the centre of a province-wide debate about power bills.
The campus, announced on July 8, 2026 and now under construction in Sturgeon County, about 35 kilometres north of Edmonton, will cover roughly 1,750 acres with 2.9 million square feet of facility space. Meta says the investment is more than CA$13 billion, plus about CA$60 million in local infrastructure improvements such as roads and water. The Alberta government says the project comes with no public subsidies, grants or discounted power.
A gigawatt-scale build
The campus is designed at 1 gigawatt of capacity, Meta’s 33rd data centre globally. Alberta says a 970-megawatt grid connection has been approved by the province’s independent system operator, alongside new private generation, with on-site generation able to scale to about 1,800 megawatts at full build-out. Next door, Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor are building the $4.6-billion Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932-megawatt power project, and Meta has a 250-megawatt long-term supply agreement with Capital Power.
Meta says the facility uses a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling, so its cooling uses no operational water, and that it will match 100 per cent of the campus’s electricity use with clean and renewable energy while fully funding the new generation and grid infrastructure it needs. About 3,000 construction workers are expected at peak, with more than 300 permanent jobs once the campus is operational. The province projects roughly $250 million a year in revenue to Albertans from royalties, taxes, levies and transmission fees, and says transmission costs on household bills could fall by up to 6 per cent.
The power-bill debate
Not everyone is persuaded. An August 2026 report from the Pembina Institute, a clean-energy think tank, estimated the project could add between $267 and $462 a year to household power bills between 2027 and 2031, an estimate Meta and the province dispute. Municipal leaders near the site have described a wary public, and the debate has sharpened this month as Albertans weigh the jobs and investment of the AI build-out against the cost of the electricity it consumes.
The disagreement is really about who pays for growth in the grid. Meta and the province say the company is funding its own generation and grid connections, which spreads fixed system costs across more users and can lower the transmission portion of everyone’s bill. The Pembina Institute’s modelling reaches the opposite conclusion on household costs. Both sides agree on the scale: a single customer drawing about a gigawatt is unlike anything Alberta’s grid has absorbed before.
Why a Surrey reader should care about an Alberta data centre
Data centres like this one are the physical backbone of the artificial intelligence tools now woven into daily life in Surrey, from the feeds on our phones to the AI assistants in local businesses. Canada’s AI build-out is landing first where land and power are available, and Alberta has moved fastest to court it. British Columbia, with its own power constraints and its history of data-centre debates, is watching the Alberta experiment closely: whether the jobs, tax revenue and AI capacity arrive as promised, and what happens to household power bills along the way, will shape how welcome the next proposal is here.
Source: Meta, “Hello, Sturgeon County!”, July 8, 2026; Government of Alberta, “AI Data Centres in Alberta.” Pembina Institute estimates are from its August 2026 “Footing the Bill” report, as reported this month.
