Meta has greenlit its 33rd global data centre, the first on Canadian soil. It will rise in Sturgeon County, northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, with a capacity of 1 gigawatt. The price tag, C$13 billion, is roughly US$9 billion. For those tracking Mark Zuckerberg’s company, the news fits a well-established pattern: following the colossal $200 billion Hyperion campus in Louisiana, the firm continues to place multi-billion-dollar bets on compute infrastructure.

The choice of Alberta is no accident. The province is rich in energy resources, offering competitive electricity prices and ample land. A 1 GW facility consumes as much power as a medium-sized city, and for running servers dedicated to model training and inference, access to abundant and relatively cheap energy becomes a primary competitive factor. To grasp the scale: 1 GW matches the output of a small nuclear reactor, or more than three million solar panels. AI eats electrons.

But the impact goes beyond Canadian borders. Every new mega-campus entrenches infrastructure concentration in the hands of a few hyperscalers. For companies considering on-premise LLM deployment, this is a warning shot: the GPU demand from these giants drains available supply, lengthening lead times and propping up prices. Anyone planning to buy servers for self-hosting risks competing directly with Meta and its peers for the same silicon. No catastrophic forecast needed—when a single customer orders tens of thousands of accelerators, manufacturers adjust output accordingly, and everyone else queues up.

Meta’s data centre in Canada also carries a positive note for digital sovereignty. Canadian organizations bound by data residency rules will be able to use cloud services with the assurance that data stays within national borders. The catch? For those seeking full control, it remains third-party infrastructure. True self-hosted, on-premise setups are a different game, demanding dedicated hardware under one’s own roof.

Meta’s infrastructure spending spree is a thermometer for the AI fever. And the fever is rising. For an ecosystem that values plurality, the risk is that the thermometer bursts, leaving room only for those who can sink billions into concrete and silicon.