CALGARY: Tech giant Meta says it will build a massive data centre (DC) in central Alberta, the company\u2019s first in Canada, as it rapidly builds out computing capacity to support the global artificial intelligence (AI) boom.<\/p>\n
The one-gigawatt (GW) DC, which will be built with the ability to scale up to 1.8GW, will be located in Sturgeon County and represents a total investment of C$13bil, or US$9.17bil, Meta said.<\/p>\n
Meta has doubled down on AI, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to build large AI DCs in the United States. The Alberta announcement represents the company\u2019s 33rd DC globally.<\/p>\n
Executives made the announcement in Calgary alongside Premier Danielle Smith and other Alberta government officials, who have spent several years courting Silicon Valley tech giants with the aim of spurring a large-scale investment in the oil-and-gas province.<\/p>\n
Alberta\u2019s technology minister, Nate Glubish, told reporters there are currently several other gigawatt-scale DC proposals in various stages of development in the province.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the first of its kind, the first of its size, the first of its scale, but it won\u2019t be the last,\u201d Glubish said.<\/p>\n
Meta, like other tech giants, is facing rapidly expanding power needs due to the growth of AI, and Alberta is rich in natural gas which sells at a significant discount to the US benchmark.<\/p>\n
The province\u2019s cold climate also makes cooling the massive super-computers and related DC infrastructure more cost-efficient.<\/p>\n
The 20 existing small to mid-scale DCs in Alberta already pull from the province\u2019s energy grid, which is 60% powered by natural gas.<\/p>\n
The provincial government is giving \u200bnew proponents the option to build their own power sources to avoid limits on power capacity.<\/p>\n
Meta said Wednesday it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure for its Alberta DC, which will consume about as much electricity as 800,000 homes.<\/p>\n
Gary Demasi, Meta\u2019s vice-president for DC development, said the company will offset that electricity use by investing in clean and renewable energy.<\/p>\n
He also said the DC will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system, meaning its total water use will be less than that of a typical golf course.<\/p>\n
The company has partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline, which announced last week it will go ahead with its Greenlight Electricity Centre, a new natural gas-fired power-generation facility in Sturgeon County which will be in service in late 2030 and with which Meta has a long-term tolling agreement.<\/p>\n
Until that project is operational and for the next decade, Alberta-based power producer Capital Power will provide 250 megawatts of electricity for the site using its existing natural gas-fired fleet.<\/p>\n
The project will require approximately 150 million cubic feet per day of natural gas, according to Pembina, helping to create demand for Western Canadian natural gas producers. \u2014 Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CALGARY: Tech giant Meta says it will build a massive data centre (DC) in central Alberta, the company\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[164,41572,17,41573,27349,41571,2132,41574],"class_list":["post-123688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-alberta","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-canada","tag-cloudcomputing","tag-corporate-news","tag-datacentres","tag-meta","tag-naturalgas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}