Meta will invest $9.17 billion (about 13 trillion won) to build its first artificial intelligence (AI) data center in Canada. It is the largest AI data center Meta has built outside the United States, reaffirming the company's investment stance on expanding AI infrastructure.
Meta announced on the 9th that it will build an AI data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, Canada. The facility will be initially developed at a scale of 1GW (gigawatt) and is designed to expand up to 1.8GW in the future. The total investment amounts to 13 billion Canadian dollars (about $9.17 billion), and it will become Meta's 33rd data center worldwide.
The data center will receive power from a natural gas power facility called the "Greenlight Electricity Centre," which will be built by a consortium led by Pembina Pipeline. Meta has signed a long-term power supply agreement with the plant. Until the plant begins operation at the end of 2030, Capital Power will supply 250MW (megawatts) of power through its existing natural gas generation facilities. Meta has also agreed to bear the cost of building new power generation facilities and grid infrastructure needed for the data center.
Alberta is actively working to attract AI data centers, leveraging its abundant natural gas, relatively low electricity costs, and cold climate. Nate Glubish, Alberta's Minister of Technology and Innovation, said, "This project is just the beginning, and more gigawatt-scale data centers will be established in the future."
Meta said it plans to apply a closed-loop liquid cooling system that does not use surrounding water resources at the data center, and to reduce the environmental impact of its power use by also investing in clean and renewable energy.
This large-scale data center construction is part of Meta's efforts to expand infrastructure following reports that it is reviewing the monetization of surplus computing resources. Earlier, Bloomberg reported on the 1st of this month that Meta is considering entering the cloud sector by selling access rights to its surplus AI computing resources.
In fact, Bernstein Research analyst Madison Reza assessed that the scale of Meta's computing infrastructure is already at a level "comparable to major cloud providers." She estimated that Meta currently holds about 20GW of computing capacity, with an additional 14GW to come online over the next several years. Meta's internal AI infrastructure utilization rate is reported to be around 65 percent, suggesting a plan to use the remaining 35 percent.
For Meta, which has been beset by controversy over overinvestment in AI, the move was interpreted as a signal to diversify revenue. On the other hand, concerns that Meta's cloud entry could cause an oversupply in the market, combined with a sense of crisis that infrastructure efficiency improvements by Big Tech could slow short-term semiconductor demand, hit the stock prices of existing cloud companies and semiconductor firms such as Micron and Intel.
Announced at such a time, this Canadian data center construction demonstrates Meta's continued determination not to halt infrastructure investment. At the same time, it is expected to serve as a test of whether the company can maintain steady utilization rates of large-scale facilities for both internal and external customers.
The U.S. independent financial media outlet 24/7 Wall St. analyzed that this investment does not represent Meta retreating from its cloud strategy, as some had feared, but rather serves to further increase the total amount of computing resources that can be monetized over the long term.
It added, "Because hyperscale data centers take years to build while AI demand grows rapidly, Meta is preemptively building infrastructure with demand after 2028 in mind."
