Alberta premier offers reassurances on massive Meta data centre during radio show

Danielle Smith spent much of her Saturday call-in radio show reassuring Albertans about tech giant Meta’s plan to build a massive data centre in the province.

“I don’t feel protected, Danielle,” one caller told Smith about the $13-billion-plus data centre set to be built north of Edmonton.

“How do you guarantee that everyday families won’t be on the hook for subsidizing big tech’s power grid demands?” asked another.

“I’m wondering what the plan is for decommissioning these very large AI data centres,” said one caller.

The premier told concerned callers that Meta Platforms Inc.’s centre will not increase their utility bills, nor strain the water supply.

Smith said Alberta’s grid operator will use surplus energy to power the centre until a new natural gas-fired plant — called the Greenlight Electricity Centre — starts powering it in 2030.

Pembina Pipeline Corp., Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management are behind the plant.

Smith said the data centre will use the same amount of water used by a typical golf course and features a closed-loop water cooling system so it won’t draw water from the surrounding area.

“There are very, very few homes within the area,” Smith added.

“They’re kilometres away so no one is impacted by the noise or the potential disruption. They also know that this is what the community, what the local leadership had approved.”

She said companies are interested in building data centres in Alberta because of province’s cold climate. The centres’ massive supercomputers and related data centre infrastructure require voracious cooling systems.

She said if Meta decides to shut down the system, the province also has decommissioning plans.

“We would put pressure on the industry to find an appropriate way to do all of the chemical or mechanical recycling to make sure that the components going into them are taken out,” she said.

“There’s no question we’ve got an electronic waste recycling stream. We’ve been doing that in our province, I think, for well over 20 years.”

The tech giant behind Facebook announced the one-gigawatt data centre in Sturgeon County this week and has said it will be online in the next two to three years.

RJ Sigurdson, Alberta’s minister of affordability and utilities, has said the first phase of the data centre project will draw 970 megawatts from the grid.

Last year, Alberta’s grid operator set aside a total of 1,200 megawatts of capacity for large-load projects like data centres until 2028 to ensure the province’s electrical system is not overburdened.

Once the $4.6-billion Greenlight Electricity Centre is built, it is set to produce 932 megawatts of power starting in the second half of 2030, with permits in hand to eventually double that.

“We told companies you can come, but you ought to build your own power and, better yet, build more than you need so you can sell back into the grid,” Smith said.

“This will … potentially get more power and will reduce overall costs.”

Meta has said it will also spend $60 million to improve local infrastructure, such as roads and water systems.

Data centres are physical facilities that house the computing hardware needed to store and distribute information for a variety of tech applications.

With the boom in artificial intelligence, the facilities have grown to mind-boggling scales to meet the vast computing demands needed to train and run those models.

“Anyone who uses a ChatGPT … anyone who creates a digital image or a video using AI, those are the reasons why there’s such demand,” Smith said.

But their expansion is concerning to Canadians who have to live near electricity and water-hungry data centres.

Alberta has been courting big tech heavyweights to set up shop in the province, setting up a “concierge” service to help navigate the regulatory process.

It has said it aims to have $100 billion in data centres under construction by the end of the decade. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 11, 2026.

— With files from Lauren Krugel