Meta spokesman Matt Sexton outlined the economic and social impacts of the $13 billion project.
Meta representatives made the case for its $13 billion Sturgeon County data center during the Alberta Industrial Center Association (AIHA) annual conference this Thursday.
AIHA is the economic development and investment organization representing Alberta’s industrial heartland investment zone in the Greater Edmonton region. AIHA speaks on behalf of its five municipal members: Edmonton, Sturgeon County, Fort Saskatchewan, Lamont and Strathcona County. The association’s annual conference brings together about 1,000 business and community leaders from the region.
“The company really has a responsibility to be part of the long-term solution to domesticate, recruit and retain talent here.”
Matt Sexton, Meta
Matt Sexton, community engagement manager for Iowa-based Meta, spoke at the conference in a session titled The man behind Build with Invest Alberta is CEO Kate Bradley. The session was billed as an opportunity for the US tech giant and AIHA members to take a closer look at the construction of what will be the largest data center in Canada, planned for Sturgeon County. The panel did not take questions from the audience.
Meta first announced plans to build the company’s first Canadian data center last July. A one-gigawatt power plant is planned for Alberta’s industrial heartland. The company said the project will provide 3,000 jobs during construction and 300 permanent jobs once operational.
The facility is expected to eventually be powered by natural gas from the Greenlight Electric Center, a 932-megawatt natural gas facility currently under construction that is not scheduled to come online until 2030.
Sexton, who supports data center development in both his home state of Iowa and in Wisconsin and Alberta, faced questions including what made Alberta attractive for investment, how the development would benefit trade workers, what the community investment would look like and what the company hopes the project will represent for Sturgeon County in five to 10 years.
Sexton largely used the 30-minute fireside chat to talk about the economic and social benefits Mehta believes the data center and its downstream operations will bring.
“I saw both qualitatively and quantitatively what this project meant,” Sexton said, adding that he lives near the Iowa data center. “3,000 trade workers will work on the arch of this project. More than 25 million labor hours will be worked.”
Sexton said Meta has already contracted most of its workforce for the Alberta project and that it has been involved in driving economic impact throughout the supply chain, including by supporting prefabrication efforts as far away as Calgary.
“It extends all the additional economic benefits beyond the property,” he said. “It’s all parts of the supply chain, from warehousing to transportation, from security to culinary services.”
“The company really has a responsibility to be part of the long-term solution to domesticate, recruit and retain talent here,” he added.
Sexton repeated several times during the call that he said operating the data center would have long-term economic impacts in terms of construction timelines, which he said would be long and cyclical.
“That kind of relationship with a general contractor never goes away. In these buildings, not unlike a phone or a laptop, after a certain period of time, say five to seven years, new technology comes out and reliability goes down and we start the process of upgrading… and installing the newest models,” Sexton said. “So this life cycle keeps these projects moving as economic catalysts.
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Sexton also instilled in the audience the idea of the long-term community impact created by Meta through tax revenue paid to the county as well as commitments to philanthropic investments—Meta has pledged to invest $60 million in local infrastructure improvements—in the community.
“We’re looking at over $30 billion in collective investment, and that will have a real spillover effect,” Sexton said.
Meta is one of the signatories to a new Canadian program encouraging the development of responsible data centers. The framework is non-binding and does not have a mechanism to force companies to follow its recommendations, which include requirements to provide facilities to produce their own energy and create economic value for Canada. A recent report from environmental think tank the Pembina Institute estimates that the data center could increase Alberta’s energy costs by hundreds of dollars per household per year.
Meta isn’t the only U.S. tech giant eyeing Alberta for a data center. Last month, job postings from AI company Anthropic said it was also considering construction in the province.
BetaKit Prairies Reports partly funded by YEGAFa non-profit organization dedicated to sharing business stories in Alberta.
Artistic image by Jesse Cole for BetaKit.