Meta Expands AI Infrastructure with $9 Billion Canadian Data Center

Meta announced on July 6, 2026 that it will build its first data center in Canada, a 1-gigawatt facility (scalable to 1.8 gigawatts) in Sturgeon County, Alberta, about 35 kilometers north of Edmonton . The project carries a total investment of roughly CA$13 billion, about $9 billion at current exchange rates, Meta's 33rd data center worldwide and its largest outside the United States . Construction is expected to take two to three years, employing around 3,000 workers at peak and supporting more than 300 permanent positions once the site is operating .

The facility will draw power partly from Project Greenlight, a CA$4.6 billion natural-gas plant being developed with Pembina Pipeline Corporation, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, and Kineticor, paired with a closed-loop liquid-cooling system Meta says avoids operational water use. Meta has said it will match the site's electricity draw with clean and renewable power. The announcement lands as META has already raised its full-year 2026 AI capital-expenditure guidance to $125 billion to $145 billion, roughly double 2025's $72.2 billion, keeping investor attention on how quickly that spending converts into returns.

That scrutiny is also behind Meta's other recent move: offering to sell excess AI compute capacity to third parties in a CoreWeave-like model, which sent its stock up 8.8% on July 1, even as CFO Susan Li has said the company has "continued to underestimate" its own compute needs . The Alberta buildout adds a new international node to that capacity race and diversifies Meta's infrastructure beyond the US, but the payoff could hinge on natural-gas plant approvals, Alberta grid capacity, and whether Meta's AI products scale fast enough to justify a multi-year, multibillion-dollar build.

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