I like AI. But Meta’s massive data centre in Sturgeon County isn’t about bringing it to you and me. It’s about something else entirely.
Meta unveiled plans to build Canada’s largest data centre — 1,000 megawatts, consuming 5% of the Alberta grid at peak. In January 2024, Alberta came within 100 megawatts of province-wide blackouts. We were asked to turn down our thermostats to avoid rotating outages. Now imagine that alert, but Meta’s data centre stays running while Albertans freeze.
Check the Current Supply and Demand Report yourself — every megawatt counts. Meta will draw 970 megawatts from the grid, plus 932 from a new gas-fired plant Pembina Pipeline is building next door, with approval to double to 1,800. That’s not a data centre. That’s a second power grid.
The real product is you #
The AI data centre is a Trojan horse. Ed Zitron, a former ad-tech executive who writes extensively about the AI industry, sees a different future than the PR narrative. He’s been inside the machine.
His analysis shows that the business case for LLMs doesn’t add up. There’s no viable return from AI itself: the money is in keeping your data. Every query into a cloud LLM gets stored. 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, who coined “surveillance capitalism,” describes a system where human experience is raw material. Your behaviour is the product.
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.
Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft need you dependent on their infrastructure. The province is rolling out the red carpet — billions in investment to get their hands on your data, and the Alberta Government is happy to take a cut. They’ve cleared the regulatory path for a company whose track record on privacy should give us pause.
Your data is already not safe #
Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal showed what happens when personal data falls into the wrong hands — the blueprint for data-driven political manipulation. It’s been a breeding ground for misinformation and foreign interference, from the Canada Convoy to American politics. Now Meta is asking Alberta to build surveillance infrastructure on a gigawatt scale inside our borders.
If you’ve been following Alberta politics, this pattern is familiar. The government allowed new coal mines on the Eastern Slopes despite a Water Not Coal petition with nearly 200,000 signatures. Elections Alberta disqualified enough to kill it — a U of T statistics professor later showed the method was seriously flawed.
The message: the province will do what it wants. Now it’s doing the same with Meta and your data.
Elections Alberta handed your personal information, names, addresses, phone numbers, to a political party, which passed it to the Centurion Project. Nobody knows how to get it back.
The database went live in April, accessed by more than 500 people. Privacy experts say it’s extremely sensitive — cross-referencable with social media, data brokers, the dark web. Once it’s out there, it can’t be un-shared.
Edmonton councillor Aaron Paquette told CBC his team was helping a domestic violence survivor relocate after she feared her address had been exposed. Elections Alberta says it cannot prevent unauthorized distribution. The government will wait for investigations before deciding to change anything.
Your provincial government already mishandled your data. Now it’s inviting Meta to collect even more.
Sturgeon County should say no #
If Meta builds here, others will follow. The province has approved 41 data centre projects — 19.5 gigawatts of potential load, up from 5 in spring 2024.
Sturgeon County has the chance to be the flashpoint. The county mayor welcomed the announcement, pointing to jobs and tax revenue. Those benefits belong to Meta and its shareholders. The risks — grid instability, rising power prices, privacy erosion — those belong to us.
We’ve seen this before. Coal mines go in despite petitions. Data centres go up despite concerns.
I don’t want my government handing a surveillance empire a gigawatt of Alberta’s electricity and calling it progress. Sturgeon County should say no.