Hello, Sturgeon County!

We are proud to announce that Sturgeon County, Alberta, will be home to our newest 1GW data centre, which will be part of our highly advanced infrastructure that helps connect billions of people around the world. 

Once completed, the Sturgeon Data Centre will represent an investment of more than CA$13 billion. We are also investing approximately CA$60 million in local infrastructure improvements, including roads and water infrastructure. We anticipate that approximately 3,000 construction workers will be onsite at the peak of construction, and the data centre will support more than 300 jobs once operational. Job opportunities will be available on the Meta Careers page in the coming weeks. For construction information and job opportunities, please visit sturgeondatacentre.com or reach out to our general contractor, Frost Collective, a joint venture between Clark Builders and PCL Construction.

We are proud to call Sturgeon County home and we are committed to being a good neighbour and investing in the long-term vitality of this community. Sturgeon County stood out as an ideal location for this data centre for its talented workforce, reliable infrastructure, and strong community partners. We believe the success of a data centre is only possible when the community succeeds alongside it, and we want Sturgeon County to thrive. We look forward to creating lasting value and contributing to the region’s economic growth for years to come.

One way we will put that commitment into action is by launching our annual Data Centre Community Action Grants programme this fall, providing direct funding for local not-for-profits that support the community.

We are committed to minimising the environmental impact of our data centres – we take a full-lifecycle approach, focusing on reducing environmental impact from design and construction through operations and the responsible management of our equipment. Meta prioritises water stewardship, and we have the global goal to be water positive in 2030. That means we will restore more water than we consume to local watersheds where Meta has owned operations. Here in Alberta, we are partnering with ALUS to support farmers in conserving 200 acres of grasslands, trees and wetlands within the North Saskatchewan River watershed. We also minimise our water use by design. Our data centre will use a water efficient closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with dry cooling, which means there is no operational water use in the cooling system. Our annual operational water use is projected to be less than one typical golf course or a 50 acre canola farm in the region.

We also plan to add enough clean energy to the Alberta grid to match 100% of the electricity use of our Sturgeon Data Centre. Importantly, we pay the full costs of our data centres’ energy use so other consumers aren’t negatively impacted, and fund new and upgraded infrastructure. We worked closely with Greenlight Limited Partnership, Altalink, Capital Power, and the Alberta Electric System Operator to plan for and meet our energy needs years in advance of our data centre coming online. We are also fully funding new generation and grid infrastructure in Alberta to support our data centre, which will improve reliability across the entire Alberta grid and benefit all consumers.

A foundational part of our data centre programme is being transparent with our operations. We disclose the water withdrawal and energy use for all our facilities on an annual basis at sustainability.atmeta.com, and will do so for the Sturgeon Data Centre once it’s operational. Learn more about how we operate at datacenters.atmeta.com.

Meta is proud to work alongside Sturgeon County, the Premier’s Office, the Government of Alberta’s Ministry of Technology and Innovation, Invest Alberta, the Alberta AI Concierge Team, Clark Builders, PCL Construction, SLB, Greenlight Limited Partnership, Altalink, Capital Power, Pembina Pipelines, the Alberta Electric System Operator, the Alberta Utilities Commission, Stikeman Elliott, and all of our partners that have helped get us to today. We are thrilled to call Sturgeon County home.

Follow our Sturgeon Data Centre journey