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The numbers that changed how to think about AI data centres
By Stan Chung
Op-Ed Commentary
For years we talked about the cloud as though it floated somewhere above us.
It doesn’t.
On July 8, Meta broke ground on the largest data-centre project in Canadian history, north of Edmonton. Suddenly the cloud has a street address.
It sits on land, draws electricity, burns natural gas and changes the choices communities have to make.
These are the eight numbers that kept changing the questions I was asking.
One gigawatt
That is the campus at opening, designed to scale to 1.8 gigawatts. Edmonton averages roughly 1,400 megawatts.
When a single industrial site approaches the electricity demand of a major city, technology and energy policy become impossible to separate.
932 megawatts
That is the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a $4.6-billion gas-fired generating station being developed by Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor under a long-term tolling agreement with Meta. Permits allow it to expand to 1,864 megawatts.
Notice the sequence. Greenlight reached its final investment decision on July 1. Meta announced six days later.
The electricity came first.
The electricity comes from gas.
150 million cubic feet
That is how much natural gas the plant could burn each day, with transportation already secured on the Alliance and NGTL systems.
For decades Alberta debated exporting gas. Perhaps it is now beginning to export something else: computation powered by Alberta gas.
3,000. Then 300.
About 3,000 workers during peak construction. More than 300 permanent jobs once the campus is operating.
Both numbers matter.
One measures construction.
The other measures what remains.
Communities that have lived beside mines, mills and dams understand the difference.
$13 billion. Beside $60 million.
Meta’s capital investment exceeds $13 billion. Its commitment to local roads, water systems and community infrastructure is approximately $60 million.
I won’t tell readers what that comparison means.
I only know the two figures belong in the same sentence.
1,200
That is the interim limit the Alberta Electric System Operator has set for new large electrical loads without affecting reliability. It is already fully allocated.
Behind it sits a queue approaching 20,000 megawatts—more electricity than Alberta has ever consumed in a single hour.
AESO chief executive Aaron Engen put it plainly: Alberta has never seen this volume of load requests.
The tough question is no longer whether projects will come.
It is which ones receive electricity first.
Less than a golf course
That is how Meta describes the water needed to cool its Sturgeon campus. The site uses closed-loop dry cooling, requiring no water for cooling itself.
That deserves to be acknowledged.
Cooling is only part of the story. Producing electricity also consumes water, and the United Nations University estimates global data centres were associated with roughly 4.5 trillion litres through electricity generation in 2025.
Elsewhere the numbers become harder. India’s data centres used an estimated 150 billion litres in 2025 and could reach 358 billion by 2030.
Water is never simply a national conversation.
It is a conversation about particular rivers, aquifers and watersheds.
25,600 acres
The Meta campus occupies 1,750 acres. BetaKit describes it as industrially zoned land not used for farming, housing or food production.
The description is accurate.
It is also incomplete.
Michel Indian Reserve No. 132 covered 25,600 acres along the Sturgeon River after the Michel Band entered Treaty 6 by adhesion in 1878.
In 1958 the federal government compulsorily enfranchised the entire band—the only time that has happened in Canadian history. Families received quarter sections. The nation disappeared from federal records.
That reserve lay west of the industrial heartland. It is not where Meta is building, and I will not pretend otherwise. Alexander First Nation’s reserve is also within Sturgeon County, and descendants of Michel continue to seek recognition.
Since reading that history, I can no longer read the words industrial land without wondering what the map leaves out.
Land does not acquire a history because someone records it.
It already has one.
The number we forgot to count
AI already helps diagnose cancer, predict wildfires and detect fraud. The same computing can also support surveillance, cyber operations and military systems.
Amnesty International Canada opposes the Sturgeon project. Campaigner Tara Scurr argues that ownership matters as much as emissions because the industry operates on a surveillance-based business model.
There is one number I could not find.
What is the public value of a gigawatt of intelligence?
Read that again.
The Columbia Basin has been here before.
The Columbia River Treaty dams went up in the 1960s without local agreement. Valleys flooded. Towns moved. The electricity left.
In 1990 Basin residents demanded a different relationship. Five years later, the province endowed Columbia Basin Trust with $321 million.
Today that endowment has grown to a book value of roughly $2.2 billion, returns about $90 million annually to the region, and the Trust and Columbia Power own four generating stations.
Set that beside $60 million for roads and water against $13 billion in private capital.
One is a community benefit.
The other is what?
I am not offering the Columbia Basin Trust as a template. It is a settlement, not a design. It exists because people were overruled first and compensated later.
Then notice two other numbers.
In 1956 Canada declared the Arrow Lakes Band extinct and returned its lands to the province. In 1958 Canada compulsorily enfranchised the Michel Band out of existence.
Two watersheds. Two years apart.
Neither required force.
Both required paperwork.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the Sinixt had never been extinct. Descendants of Michel are still seeking recognition.
We count megawatts. We count jobs. We count litres of water. We count billions of dollars.
Perhaps it is time we also counted ownership.
The cloud has a street address.
AI data centres deserve the same public conversation we have about dams, mines, LNG terminals and railways—not because they are the same, but because they leave us with the same civic questions.
Who benefits?
Who bears the costs?
Who decides?
– Stan Chung, PhD lives in Cranbrook. He is a writer, strategic advisor, speaker and a 2026 Governor General’s laureate.
