Meta will invest more than $9.1 billion (about 13 trillion won) to build its first artificial intelligence (AI) data center in Canada. It will be the largest AI data center Meta has built outside the United States.
On the 8th, Meta announced it would construct the data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, Canada. It will initially be built at a scale of 1 gigawatt (GW) and is expected to be designed to expand up to 1.8GW. The Alberta project is Meta's 33rd data center worldwide.
As AI infrastructure has surged, Alberta has actively courted major Silicon Valley technology companies to attract large-scale investment to a region centered on the oil and gas industry. Nate Glubish, Alberta's Minister of Technology and Innovation, said, "This project is the first of its kind, the first of its scale, and the first of its level, but it will not be the last."
The construction of the large data center is expected to quell concerns about investment cutbacks that arose after Meta announced plans to monetize surplus computing resources following its massive AI investments. Meta plans to apply a closed-loop cooling system to the data center that does not use surrounding water resources, and it has also agreed to fully cover the cost of building new power generation facilities and grid infrastructure.
