Meta representatives made the case for its $13 billion Sturgeon County data centre during the Alberta Industrial Heartland Association’s (AIHA) annual conference this Thursday.
The AIHA is an economic development and investment organization representing Alberta’s Industrial Heartland—an investment zone in the Greater Edmonton Region. The AIHA advocates on behalf of its five municipal members: Edmonton, Sturgeon County, Fort Saskatchewan, Lamont, and Strathcona County. The association’s annual conference attracts roughly 1,000 business and community leaders from the area.
“It’s really incumbent on the company to be a part of the long-term solution to domesticate, and recruit and retain talent here.”
Matt Sexton, Meta
Matt Sexton, an Iowa-based community engagement manager with Meta, spoke at the conference as part of a session called Behind the Build with Invest Alberta CEO Keith Bradley. The session was billed as an opportunity for the US tech giant and AIHA attendees to get a closer look at the data centre buildout, which will be the largest in Canada, that’s planned for Sturgeon County. The panel did not take audience questions.
Meta first announced plans to build the company’s first Canadian data centre last July. The one-gigawatt facility is slated for construction within Alberta’s Industrial Heartland. The company has claimed the project will support 3,000 jobs during construction, and 300 permanent jobs once operational.
The facility is purported to eventually be powered by natural gas from the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932-megawatt natural gas facility currently being constructed that is not intended to come online until 2030.
Sexton, who supports data centre development both in his home state of Iowa as well as in Wisconsin and Alberta, faced questions including what made Alberta attractive for investment, what kind of benefits development would bring to trade workers, what community investment would look like, and what the company hoped the project would represent for Sturgeon County in five to 10 years time.
Sexton largely used the 30-minute fireside chat to expound on the economic and social benefits Meta believes will come from the data centre and its subsequent operations.
“I have seen both qualitatively and quantitatively what this project means,” Sexton said, adding that he lives near a data centre in Iowa. “3,000 trade workers on site for the arch of this project. There are going to be over 25 million work hours.”
Sexton said Meta has already contracted much of its workforce for the project within Alberta, and that it was involved in spurring economic impact throughout the supply chain, including by supporting prefabrication work as far away as Calgary.
“That extends all of the ancillary economic benefits outside of the property,” he said. “These are every part of the supply chain from warehousing to transportation, security to culinary services.”
“It’s really incumbent on the company to be a part of the long-term solution to domesticate, and recruit and retain talent here,” he added.
Sexton reiterated several times throughout the conversation what he claimed would be the long-lasting economic impact of operating the data centre in terms of construction timelines, which he said would be long and cyclical.
“That kind of general contractor relationship never dissipates. These buildings, not unlike a phone or laptop, after a certain time, say five to seven years, there’s new technology and reliability goes down, and we begin the process of refreshing … and installing the newest models,” Sexton said. “So that life cycle keeps these projects moving as economic catalysts.
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Sexton also sold the audience on the notion of long-term community impacts created by Meta through tax revenues paid to the County, as well as commitments around philanthropic investments—Meta has promised to invest $60 million in local infrastructure improvements—in the community.
“We’re looking at more than $30 billion of collective investment, and that has a real ancillary rolling impact,” Sexton said.
Meta is one of the signatories of Canada’s new framework encouraging the development of responsible data centres. The framework is non-binding and has no mechanism for compelling companies to follow its guidelines, which include asks for facilities to generate their own power and create economic value for Canada. A recent report from environmental think tank the Pembina Institute estimates that the data centre could drive up Alberta electricity costs by hundreds of dollars per household per year.
Meta isn’t the only US tech giant eyeing Alberta for a data centre buildout. Last month, job postings from AI firm Anthropic indicated it is also considering building in the province.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image by Jesse Cole for BetaKit.