We’re breaking ground on a new 1GW data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta — our first data center in Canada and 33rd in our global fleet. This data center will be optimized for our AI workloads, helping bring to life the technologies that billions around the world use to connect, find communities, grow businesses, and experience the power of our wearables.
Investing in Sturgeon County #
Once complete, our Sturgeon County data center will represent an investment of more than CAD $13 billion. We anticipate approximately 3,000 construction workers will be onsite at the peak of construction, and the data center will support more than 300 operational jobs.
We’re also investing approximately CAD $60 million in local infrastructure improvements that will benefit the local community, including roads and water infrastructure, and will launch our annual Data Center Community Action Grants in the region, providing direct funding for local nonprofits that support the community.
Supporting the Electrical Grid #
We pay the full costs of our data centers’ energy use so consumers aren’t negatively impacted, and fund new and upgraded infrastructure. We worked closely with Greenlight Limited Partnership, Altalink, Capitol Power, and the Alberta Electric System Operator to plan for and meet our energy needs years in advance of this data center coming online.
In Alberta, we are fully funding new generation and grid infrastructure to support our data center, which will improve reliability across the entire Alberta grid and will benefit all consumers.
As with all of our data centers, this data center’s electricity use will be matched with 100% clean and renewable energy.
Prioritizing Water Stewardship #
We strive to be good water stewards in communities where we have data centers, and Meta aims to be water positive in 2030, meaning we’ll restore more water than we consume globally where Meta has owned operations. That’s why we minimize water use in our data centers by design and use water as efficiently as possible in our operations.
At our Sturgeon data center, we plan to use a water efficient closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling, which means there will be no operational water use in the cooling system. As a result, water use at the site will be limited to domestic uses, fire protection safety, and equipment maintenance. We also pay the full costs of water and wastewater service required to support our data centers so consumers aren’t negatively impacted, and disclose the water withdrawal and energy use for all our facilities on an annual basis at sustainability.atmeta.com.
We’re excited to call Sturgeon County home for our newest data center, and look forward to working with and contributing positively to the local community.