Meta to Invest $9.1 Billion in First AI Data Center in Canada

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, said Wednesday it will invest more than 13 billion Canadian dollars — equivalent to approximately $9.1 billion US — to construct its first artificial intelligence data center in Canada. The facility will be located in Alberta and will be the largest AI infrastructure project Meta has built outside the United States.

The announcement was made during a visit by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Canada, where he met with Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has been actively courting major tech investment as part of his strategy to deepen Canada-US economic ties while hedging against trade uncertainty.

Why Canada, Why Now

The investment comes amid an intensifying global race among the major technology companies — including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — to build out the massive computational infrastructure needed to train and run large AI models.

Canada has positioned itself as an attractive destination for this kind of investment, citing its abundant clean energy resources, its strong university research pipeline in AI (the country is home to several of the world's leading AI research institutes), and a more stable political environment for large infrastructure commitments compared to some other jurisdictions.

Alberta, in particular, has been aggressive in attracting data center investment, offering energy at competitive rates. The province's power grid is expected to be substantially expanded with renewable energy over the coming years to support the facility's significant electricity demands.

Jobs and Economic Impact

Meta said the data center is expected to directly employ thousands of workers during construction and hundreds of permanent staff once operational. The company said it would also support thousands of indirect jobs in supply chains and supporting industries.

Canadian officials welcomed the announcement as a vote of confidence in the country's technology sector. "This is one of the largest tech investments in Canadian history," said a senior government official.

The AI Race

Meta has been investing heavily in AI infrastructure after a period of turbulence in 2022 and 2023. Its Llama family of AI models has become one of the most widely used open-source AI frameworks, and the company is competing directly with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic for AI talent and compute resources. The Canada data center is part of a broader global investment plan announced earlier this year that totals hundreds of billions of dollars across multiple countries.