- The project will similarly place new demands on the region’s water resources, adding another layer of environmental strain atop the direct emissions from on-site gas combustion
When Meta announced in early July 2026 that it would build its first-ever Canadian AI data centre in Sturgeon County, Alberta, the fanfare from provincial officials was considerable.
Premier Danielle Smith hailed the project as a historic win — one that would generate “thousands of jobs, hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, and make electricity more reliable and affordable.”
With a total investment reaching approximately $10 billion and a planned capacity of one gigawatt — enough to power roughly 750,000 homes — it is, by any measure, the largest private-sector AI data centre investment in Canadian history.
But amid the celebratory rhetoric, one crucial detail has been conspicuously downplayed: this massive facility will run almost entirely on fossil fuels.
Alberta’s existing electricity grid simply cannot supply the staggering amount of energy that a hyperscale AI data centre demands. Meta’s facility, which is designed to eventually scale up to 1.8 gigawatts, requires a power source of a magnitude that far exceeds what the provincial grid can provide on its own.
The solution, as outlined by the provincial government, is a combination of “grid-connected electricity with new on-site natural gas generation”.
That new generation is coming in the form of the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932-megawatt gas-fired power plant being developed by Pembina Pipeline Corporation in partnership with Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners.
Approved on July 2, 2026 — nearly a week before Meta’s own announcement — the $4.6 billion plant will be located within the Alberta Industrial Heartland and, as Pembina confirmed, will “serve a major data center development” .
The identity of that major customer became clear days later when Alberta officials confirmed Meta as Greenlight’s primary client.
The timeline is revealing. The plant was greenlit before Meta publicly confirmed its data centre plans, suggesting a carefully choreographed sequence in which the energy infrastructure was quietly locked into place first, with the tech giant’s brand name deployed afterward to generate political and public goodwill.
Why Alberta?
Meta’s choice of Alberta was not driven by altruism, despite the company’s pledge to invest $60 million in local roads and water infrastructure. The province offers something far more valuable to a company building an energy-hungry AI facility: an abundance of cheap, readily accessible fossil fuels.
Alberta is the undisputed heart of Canada’s energy sector, accounting for over 90 per cent of the country’s oil production and approximately 60 per cent of its natural gas output. The province has actively pitched this abundance to tech companies seeking reliable power for the AI boom, positioning cheap natural gas as a competitive advantage — even as the federal government pushes toward cleaner energy targets.
“Rapid growth in AI and cloud computing is driving durable global demand for data centre capacity, and Alberta has positioned itself as an attractive jurisdiction for significant investment,” Pembina stated in its announcement.
The logic is straightforward: fossil fuels are constant, reliable, and immediately available. Renewables, while growing, cannot yet match the 24/7 baseload power that hyperscale AI workloads require.
The uncomfortable climate math
The environmental implications are difficult to square with the tech industry’s public commitments to sustainability. Meta, like most major technology firms, has made ambitious pledges about carbon neutrality and renewable energy. Yet the Alberta facility’s dependence on a dedicated natural gas plant tells a different story.
According to the International Energy Agency, global data centre electricity consumption is projected to more than double by 2030, with AI-specific data centre demand potentially tripling. Natural gas and coal together are expected to meet over 40 per cent of the additional electricity demand from data centres through the end of the decade.
Renewables are forecast to cover nearly half of the growth, but the sheer scale of the demand means fossil fuels remain indispensable in the near term.
This tension is not unique to Meta. Across the industry, Big Tech companies — including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — are increasingly relying on gas and diesel generation to power hyperscale facilities.
The gap between sustainability rhetoric and on-the-ground energy decisions is widening as the AI race accelerates.
Water and environmental costs
Energy consumption is only part of the environmental equation. Data centres are also voracious consumers of water, primarily for cooling the servers that run AI workloads around the clock. Meta’s global water consumption reached 813 million gallons in 2023, and individual facilities — such as its Newton County, Georgia data center — have been reported to use 500,000 gallons of water per day.
In some communities, this has sparked significant backlash. A Meta data center in Louisiana, for example, has drawn criticism for its planned use of up to 1.5 million gallons of water daily, pulled from an aquifer that serves local residents.
The Alberta project will similarly place new demands on the region’s water resources, adding another layer of environmental strain atop the direct emissions from on-site gas combustion.
