I use AI. I like AI. I think it’s an amazing technology.
But the massive data centre Meta is building in Sturgeon County is not about bringing AI to you and me. It’s about something else entirely.
Meta [unveiled plans]this week to build what will be Canada’s largest data centre — a 1,000 megawatt campus that will consume roughly 5% of the entire Alberta grid at peak demand. To put that in perspective: in January 2024, Alberta came within 100 megawatts of province-wide blackouts during an ice storm. Albertans were asked to turn down their thermostats and turn off their lights to avoid rotating outages. We did the neighbourly Albertan thing and helped out to avoid disaster.
Now imagine that grid alert again, but this time Meta’s data centre stays running while Albertans freeze in the dark.
This is not an exaggeration. The Alberta grid is real. You can check the [Current Supply and Demand Report]yourself — every megawatt counts. Meta will be drawing 970 megawatts from the grid, plus another 932 megawatts from a new gas-fired power plant Pembina Pipeline is building next door. The plant has approval to double to 1,800 megawatts. That’s not a data centre. That’s a second power grid.
The real product is you #
Here’s what nobody wants to talk about: the AI data centre is a Trojan horse.
Ed Zitron, a former ad-tech executive who writes extensively about the AI industry, see’s a different future that what the PR has been telling us. He’s been inside the machine. He knows how it works.
The business case for large language models doesn’t add up. There is no viable rate of return from LLM use itself. The money isn’t in the AI, it’s in keeping your data. Every query you type into a cloud LLM gets stored. Every click, comment, and share Facebook records is kept forever. Facebook doesn’t just track what you do. It keeps a record of everything.
“It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Zuboff, a Harvard professor who coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” describes a system where human experience is raw material. Your behaviour is the product. Meta’s data centre is the factory that processes it.
Zitron calls it a “carousel of concepts that add little to society other than absorbing resources and potentially harming people.” The LLMs are the distraction. The real business is behavioural surplus: your data, commodified and sold to whoever is buying.
You don’t need their data centre #
Open-source large language models run on consumer hardware. Anyone can download and run them, no data centre needed. You can run them on your own computer, in your own home or business, with your own data staying where it belongs — with you.
Meta and the other cloud providers like OpenAI and Microsoft don’t want you to know this. They need you dependent on their infrastructure. They need your data in their servers, not yours.
This is why the province is rolling out the red carpet. These companies will spend billions of dollars to get their hands on your personal and business information, and the Alberta Government is more than happy to take a cut. They’ve cleared the regulatory path. They’ve made it easy.
And they’re doing it for a company whose track record on privacy and public safety should give us pause.
Facebook is not a friend #
Facebook’s involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed the world what happens when personal data falls into the wrong hands. This was the blueprint for data-driven political manipulation. They realized how powerful your data really is.
Facebook has also been a breeding ground for misinformation and a vector for foreign interference. We’ve seen it play out in the Canada Convoy, in American politics, everywhere social media meets democracy.
Now Meta is asking Alberta to build it a surveillance infrastructure on a gigawatt scale inside our own borders.
This is how it works #
If you’ve been following Alberta politics, this pattern should feel familiar. The government decided to allow new coal mines on the Eastern Slopes despite overwhelming public opposition. The [Water Not Coal petition] gathered nearly 200,000 signatures, more than enough to force a referendum. Elections Alberta’s verification process disqualified enough signatures to kill it. A U of T statistics professor later showed the method was seriously flawed. The petition should have passed.
The message was clear: the province will do what it wants, regardless of what Albertans say.
Now it’s doing the same thing with Meta and your personal data.
Your data is already not safe #
Elections Alberta handed your personal information — names, addresses, phone numbers, electoral divisions — to a political party. That party handed it to a group called the Centurion Project. Nobody knows how, and nobody seems to know how to get it back.
The [database went live] in April, and more than 500 people accessed it. Privacy experts say the information is extremely sensitive. It can be cross-referenced with social media, data brokers, the dark web. Once it’s out there, it can’t be un-shared.
Edmonton city councillor Aaron Paquette told CBC that his team was [helping a domestic violence survivor relocate]because she feared her address had been exposed. She had been in hiding from an ex-partner.
Elections Alberta says it cannot prevent unauthorized distribution because of how the law is written. The government says it will wait for investigations to finish before deciding whether to change anything.
Your provincial government already mishandled your data. Now it’s doubling down and inviting Meta to collect even more of it and store it forever.
Sturgeon County should say no #
This is the first one. If Meta builds here, others will follow. The province has already approved 41 data centre projects representing 19.5 gigawatts of potential load, up from just 5 gigawatts in the spring of 2024.
Sturgeon County has the chance to be the flashpoint. To stand up not just for itself, but for every Albertan who will feel the consequences of this decision.
The county mayor welcomed the announcement, pointing to jobs and tax revenue. Those benefits are real, but they belong to Meta and its shareholders. The risks: grid instability, rising power prices, the erosion of privacy, the concentration of behavioural data in the hands of a company with no respect for democratic norms — those belong to us.
We’ve seen how this story ends. Coal mines go in despite petitions. Data centres go up despite concerns. And the people who live with the consequences are told to be grateful for the jobs.
There are plenty of legitimate uses for LLM technology, and all of them can be accomplished using local hardware. I don’t want my government handing a surveillance empire a gigawatt of Alberta’s electricity and calling it progress.
Sturgeon County should stand up for Albertans and say no.