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Meta’s Alberta Data Centre and an Undisclosed Financier

Meta’s Alberta Data Centre and an Undisclosed Financier
AB Best July 24, 2026

Meta’s Alberta Data Centre and an Undisclosed Financier

A federal Crown corporation quietly financed the gas plant behind Meta’s $13-billion Alberta data centre — and stayed silent about it for three weeks. Here’s how the story broke, and what it reveals about who’s really paying for Alberta’s AI boom.

On July 24, Canada’s National Observer broke a story that had been sitting quietly for three weeks.

A federal Crown corporation — Export Development Canada, backstopped by Canadian taxpayers — had put up to $200 million behind the gas plant built to power Meta’s new data centre north of Edmonton. Nobody had announced it. Nobody outside the deal even knew.

The loan itself had gone out on July 2, the same day Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, and Kineticor Asset Management signed off on the final investment decision for the $4.6-billion plant. Three weeks passed before anyone outside that room heard a word about it.

The plant is called Greenlight. Its entire purpose is to keep the lights on, and the servers running, at Meta’s $13-billion data centre campus — the company’s first in Canada, and its largest anywhere outside the United States.

The Crown Corporation Behind the Loan

EDC exists to help Canadian companies compete abroad. It doesn’t usually show up in conversations about AI or electricity prices. But in 2025 alone, its support for the oil and gas sector jumped 22 per cent, to $9.3 billion.

This isn’t the first time EDC has shown up on the exact day a Pembina gas project got its green light, either. In June 2024, it lent up to $500 million to the Haisla Nation and Pembina’s Cedar LNG terminal in British Columbia — again, timed to the final investment decision. Greenlight makes it two for two.

Sit with that for a second if you run a business in Red Deer or Lethbridge and have ever waited months for a bank to approve a fraction of that amount. The math works differently when the borrower is Pembina and the project touches Meta.

Why the Gas Plant Isn’t Even Running Yet

Here’s the part that tends to get lost in the bigger numbers: Greenlight won’t be generating electricity until 2030. Meta’s data centre is expected to start pulling power from the grid in 2028 — two full years earlier — through Capital Power’s existing gas fleet and a 250-megawatt supply deal already signed.

So for at least two years, the newest AI facility in the country runs on ordinary Alberta grid power while the purpose-built gas plant is still under construction. The corporate messaging leans hard on clean energy and closed-loop cooling. The interim electricity mix tells a plainer story.

Meta has said it will fund the generation and grid infrastructure the project needs and limit the strain on local water use. It’s also investing roughly $60 million in Sturgeon County roads and water systems, and setting up a community grants program for local nonprofits. Those commitments are real, and worth noting alongside the rest.

What It Means for Alberta Electricity Prices

The Alberta government frames data centres as a revenue win — jobs, taxes, royalties, a province leading North America’s AI build-out. All of that is true. It’s also true that a recent investigation found some Alberta utilities expect electricity prices to roughly triple as data centre demand climbs.

An accountant in Edmonton reconciling a small business’s utility bill next winter isn’t going to see a line item that says “AI infrastructure demand.” She’s just going to see the number go up.

The Greenlight plant itself carries a classification most people will never read past a footnote: Category A, a project “likely to have significant adverse environmental and social effects.” It wasn’t required to undergo a full federal impact assessment — regulators found the effects within federal jurisdiction limited or addressable through other means. Whether that holds up over the decades a plant is expected to run is a separate question from whether the paperwork was in order.

Meta’s Same-Day Retreat from Clean Energy

The day this story broke, Meta also withdrew from RE100 — the global pledge to run on 100 per cent renewable electricity. The company still points to renewable energy certificates as evidence of a clean footprint. Still, researchers publishing in Nature Climate Change have found that kind of certificate purchasing doesn’t reliably translate into actual emissions reductions.

Pembina’s CEO has been candid that this project won’t be the last of its kind — that the harder part was getting the first one built, and more will follow now that a template exists.

That’s likely true. Alberta’s gas reserves, cold climate, and available land make it the obvious address for the next wave of data centres lining up behind Meta. EDC has now shown twice that it’s willing to move fast and quietly to help finance the infrastructure underneath that boom.

What the $200 Million Actually Funds

Strip away the AI branding and the renewable energy language, and the plant at the centre of this is exactly what it’s always been — a gas-fired power station, financed in part by a federal lending institution, built to serve one of the wealthiest companies on Earth.

None of that makes the jobs or the investment less real. Three thousand construction workers and 300 permanent positions are not abstractions in Sturgeon County. But there’s a difference between a province winning big and a province’s taxpayers quietly co-signing the loan that made the win possible — without ever being asked.

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