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Chris Varcoe: The gigawatt-scale facility will create 3,000 construction positions and support 300 jobs once it’s operating
By Chris Varcoe
Alberta has finally landed its first whale in the quest to draw $100 billion of data centre investment into the province — a new campus to be built by Meta Platforms.
But the story behind the story dates back years, and the groundwork assembled during this period should help pave the way for more developments to arrive in Alberta.
The opportunity of bringing data centre investment to Alberta has its genesis in November 2021, after giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it would create a cloud computing hub and build three data centres in the Calgary area.
The announcement gained widespread attention within the province. It also raised the possibility that larger, more energy-intense centres needed for artificial intelligence development could eventually be built here.
“When AWS originally landed in Alberta, we developed a great relationship over time and they were the ones that flagged for us that the industry was going to be facing huge demand on this AI-compute product,” recalled Rick Christiaanse, former CEO of Invest Alberta, the Crown corporation that seeks to attract new investment into the province.
“The industry was going to have to build triple the amount of data centres that they had already built by that time, and there was going to be significant demand.”
Yet, that was just the start of the concept to land AI data centres.
Significant momentum built over the past 24 months.
Alberta Technology Minister Nate Glubish said his conversations with the U.S. tech giant Meta began after the province assembled a working group of ministers and departments in 2024 to develop a road map to bring data centres to Alberta.
“It was the summer of 2024, that was when I first met with the global data centre team at Meta’s offices in San Francisco in the Bay area, and made the initial pitch for how Alberta has all of the building blocks of what they need in order to be successful,” Glubish said in an interview earlier this week.
“That was the beginning of our conversations . . . and we’ve been working with them ever since.”
Those talks culminated in Wednesday’s announcement the U.S. hyperscaler, which owns Facebook, will soon start construction on an AI-focused data centre campus in Sturgeon County, about 35 kilometres north of Edmonton.
As the largest data centre in Canada — and Meta’s first in the country — the gigawatt-scale facility will create 3,000 construction positions and support 300 jobs once it’s operating.
And there could be more to come, say industry players and experts.
“We expect it will accelerate interest in the province and help attract further investment,” said Angela Adam of eStruxture Data Centers, which is building a 90-megawatt, AI-focused facility north of Calgary.
“It validates everything we believed about Alberta for the past three years, and everything we believe that will be important for the decades to come,” added David Lane, CEO of Beacon Data Centers, which is working on six proposed developments in Alberta.
During an Invest Alberta event during Stampede two years ago, Premier Danielle Smith told a room of out-of-town investors that she was hearing strong interest from prospective data centre developers. She also advised any proponents to bring their own electricity, rather than rely on the provincial grid to power such energy-intensive operations.
“We are a tiny part of the market right now. But the opportunity is just extraordinary,” Smith said in an interview in July 2024.
“Almost every meeting I’ve had for the past two days has been around data centres and AI.”
Alberta has several qualities that makes it an attractive location for these operations — including access to energy that is needed to generate electricity for these facilities, available land, and skilled workers to build and operate them.
There has been opposition to other proposals in the province — usually focused on land use, water consumption and noise — but the Meta project is being built in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland. A new $4.6-billion gas-fired power plant is also being constructed nearby to help power the facility.
“The things that make this particular location attractive for us — energy supply, energy infrastructure — is really sort of the most important component of what makes a data centre campus function,” Gary Demasi, Meta’s vice-president of data centre development, said in an interview.
Data centres will ensure that Canada has the ability to be involved in developing AI, while also keeping domestic data within the country.
“Running the data centre doesn’t take a lot of people, and that’s what critics point to and say, ‘Well, you’re not creating a lot of employment once the thing starts running,’ ” said energy economist Peter Tertzakian, who is on the board of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.
“But that’s not necessarily true . . . what you’re doing is also providing access to the top research minds, and then very technical people who will develop the next levels of AI and not be hostage to having done it in another country.”
Meta’s project will also set the table for more developments, say industry leaders.
“Our ambition is to start construction on one of those facilities in the second half of this year,” said Lane, whose company is developing a project in Sturgeon County near Meta’s facility, and another in Rocky View County.
“It’s truly a landmark . . . to see that industry grow here.”
Chris Varcoe is a Calgary Herald columnist.
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