Alberta’s emergence as a destination for large-scale digital infrastructure took another major step forward with Meta’s decision to develop its first Canadian data centre campus in Sturgeon County.
The project represents an investment of more than $13 billion and is expected to create over 3,000 construction jobs and approximately 300 permanent positions. With nearly 970 megawatts of grid-connected power planned across two phases, the development demonstrates the extraordinary scale of energy infrastructure required to support the continued growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
For Source Geothermal, the announcement also reinforces a larger global trend: the future of AI infrastructure will increasingly depend on access to reliable energy, efficient cooling technologies and locations capable of supporting rapid development at unprecedented scale.
Alberta offers several significant advantages. The province combines extensive energy expertise, industrial infrastructure, investment-ready land and a regulatory environment designed to support major projects. Its Bring-Your-Own-Power framework also provides a pathway for large data centre developments to secure additional generation capacity while protecting grid reliability.
The Meta campus is expected to use closed-loop liquid cooling and dry cooling technology, eliminating operational water consumption for cooling. This highlights another increasingly important consideration for the data centre industry: as facilities become larger and more energy intensive, efficiency must extend beyond electricity consumption to include cooling and water management.
The rapid expansion of AI is creating a fundamental shift in how the world thinks about energy and digital infrastructure.
For Source Geothermal, this transformation represents an opportunity to explore how geothermal resources and advanced cooling technologies can contribute to the next generation of data centre development.
Meta’s investment is more than a major economic announcement for Alberta. It is another indication that the intersection of energy, cooling and computing infrastructure will help define the next chapter of global AI growth.
