Meta's Alberta data center will be running for two years before the gas plant built to power it exists

Meta is building its first Canadian data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, northeast of Edmonton. The company put the investment at more than CA$13 billion (about US$9.17 billion), the capacity at one gigawatt with permits to scale to 1.8, and the building at roughly 270,000 square meters with closed loop liquid cooling. It will be Meta's 33rd data center.

The interesting number is not the money. It is the calendar.

The site starts before its power plant does

Meta expects the data center to be online "in the next two to three years," spokesperson Stacey Yip told The Canadian Press. Call it 2028 or 2029.

The Greenlight Electricity Centre, the CA$4.6 billion, 932 MW gas plant being built next door by Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor, is expected to produce power in the second half of 2030.

So for something like a year or two, a gigawatt-class facility exists and the generation built for it does not. That gap has to be filled by the grid Alberta already has.

Where the electricity actually comes from in the meantime

Alberta's grid operator set aside 1,200 MW of connection capacity for large loads like data centers through 2028, to keep the system from being swamped. The Greenlight partners took a chunk of it, and that reservation is what made the project bankable.

"Enabling that grid connection was crucial in giving Meta the speed to market they needed," RJ Sigurdson, Alberta's minister of affordability and utilities, said this week. "Without this grid-connected pathway, Alberta may not have landed this massive new tenant."

Sigurdson said the first phase will draw 970 MW from the grid under a long-term contract with a "wholesale power provider" he did not name. Separately, Edmonton utility Capital Power announced a long-term supply deal with the Meta site for 250 MW starting in the second half of 2028.

Alberta's generation mix is overwhelmingly natural gas since the province finished retiring coal. Interim power from that grid is gas power, and the plant that eventually replaces it is also gas.

What "100 percent clean and renewable" is doing in that sentence

Rachel Peterson, Meta's VP of data centers, wrote on LinkedIn that the company is "fully funding new generation and grid infrastructure in Alberta, which improves the reliability for all consumers," and that Meta will "continue to match this facility's electricity use with 100 percent clean and renewable energy."

Read the verb. Match, not supply. Meta's standard practice is to buy renewable energy certificates or contract new renewable projects equal to the megawatt hours it consumes, then net the two against each other on an annual basis. That is a real procurement commitment and it is not the same claim as running the building on clean electrons. The electrons feeding a Sturgeon County server hall in 2029 come from whatever Alberta is burning that hour, and Meta has not published an hourly matching commitment for this site.

David Pickup, who runs the electricity program at the Pembina Institute (an environmental think tank, no relation to Pembina Pipeline), made the same objection from the other direction: "Already, other jurisdictions and operators have chosen a different path: to power these operations with renewables first and foremost."

The other numbers, and who is making them

The jobs and revenue figures are the province's, in an announcement the province staged with Premier Danielle Smith. Take the 6 percent bill relief as a projection, not a measurement. Also note that most US coverage rounded this to a "$10 billion" data center, which is neither the Canadian figure Meta gave nor its US dollar conversion.

For scale on where this is heading: researchers at York University's Schulich School of Business found Alberta now accounts for 92 percent of Canada's planned new data center capacity while holding about 10 percent of currently active facilities. The province says it wants $100 billion of data centers under construction by 2030. Meta is separately projecting US$120 billion to US$135 billion in capex this year and has stood up a division, Meta Compute, to build "tens of gigawatts this decade."

The engineering here is not in dispute. A gigawatt of liquid-cooled compute next to cheap gas, a dedicated 932 MW plant, and a grid operator willing to reserve headroom is a coherent plan for putting a lot of accelerators somewhere they can actually be powered. The part worth watching is what runs the site for the two years before that plan finishes, and whether Alberta ends up carrying that load.