Alberta premier offers reassurances on massive Meta data centre

Alberta premier offers reassurances on massive Meta data centre

Centre will use same amount of water as a typical golf course, Smith says

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 Sturgeon County, a municipality northeast of Edmonton.

"I don't feel protected, Danielle," one caller told Smith about the $13-billion-plus data centre.

"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.

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Data centres are physical facilities that house the computing hardware needed to store and distribute information for a variety of tech applications. The buildings are controversial because of the demand they can place on water resources, particularly to cool equipment.

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

Meta's 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, Smith said, adding there are "very, very few homes within the area."

"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."

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

Tech giant Meta is building a $13-billion data centre in Sturgeon County

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

Companies are interested in building data centres in Alberta because of province's cold climate, Smith said.

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

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"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."

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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.

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, Smith said.

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.

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"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."

With the boom in artificial intelligence, data centres have grown to mind-boggling scales to meet the vast computing demands needed to train and run those models, but their expansion is concerning to Canadians who have to live near electricity and water-hungry facilities.

"Anyone who creates a digital image or a video using AI, those are the reasons why there's such demand," Smith said.

Alberta has been courting big tech heavyweights to set up shop in the province, and has said it aims to have $100 billion in data centres under construction by the end of the decade.

With files from the Canadian Press's Lauren Krugel and the CBC's Michelle Bellefontaine