* Alberta pitched cheap gas and cooler temperatures as key

advantages

* 1 gigawatt facility is Meta's 33rd globally

* Data center will be built in Sturgeon County in central

Alberta

By Amanda Stephenson

CALGARY, July 8 (Reuters) - Tech giant Meta announced

Wednesday it will build a massive data center in central

Alberta, the company's first in Canada, as it rapidly builds out

computing capacity to support the global AI boom.

The 1-gigawatt data center will be located in Sturgeon

County and represents a total investment of C$13 billion, or

$9.17 billion, Meta said.

Meta has doubled down on AI, pledging hundreds of billions of

dollars to build large AI data centers in the U.S. The Alberta

announcement represents the company's 33rd data center

globally.

Executives made the announcement in Calgary alongside Premier

Danielle Smith and other Alberta government officials, who have

spent several years courting Silicon Valley tech giants with the

aim of spurring a large-scale investment in the oil-and-gas

province.

Meta, like other tech giants, is facing rapidly expanding

power needs due to the growth of AI, and Alberta is rich in

natural gas which sells at a significant discount to the U.S.

benchmark.

The province's cold climate also makes cooling the massive

super-computers and related data center infrastructure more

cost-efficient.

The 20 existing small- to mid-scale data centers in Alberta

already pull from the province's energy grid, which is 60%

powered by natural gas. The provincial government is giving ​new

proponents the option to build their own power sources to avoid

limits on power capacity.

Meta said Wednesday it will fully fund new generation and

grid infrastructure for its Alberta data center, which will

consume about as much electricity as 800,000 homes.

The company has partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline ( PBA ),

which announced last week it will go ahead with its Greenlight

Electricity Centre, a new natural gas-fired power-generation

facility in Sturgeon County which will be in service in late

2030 and with which Meta has a long-term tolling agreement.

The project will require approximately 150 million cubic

feet per day of natural gas, according to Pembina, helping to

create demand for Western Canadian natural gas producers.

Canada's government laid out an AI strategy last month that

suggested new data center growth would benefit from the

country's clean electricity grid, which is largely powered by

renewables and low-emission power sources.

But the vast majority of data centers currently in the

planning stages in Canada are located in Alberta, where a

reliance on natural gas means the emissions intensity of the

province's electricity grid is almost five times the national

average.