Meta’s data center invasion of Canada has begun. It’s as good a time as any to remember that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have a very strange history with Canada.
In a blog post, the company says it’s “breaking ground” on what’s meant to be a one gigawatt AI data center in Sturgeon County, part of the province of Alberta. That’s about 350 miles due north of the U.S. border—way up there, but hardly the middle of nowhere. In fact it’s just north of Edmonton, the northernmost North American city with over 1 million people.
Alberta is a famously low-regulation environment, sometimes called “the Texas of Canada.” A Meta spokesperson told CNBC, “This specific location met the factors we typically look for: good access to infrastructure, a robust electric grid and access to energy, a strong pool of talent, and a great set of community partners that helped us move this project forward.”
This data center, Meta’s blog post claims, “represents an investment of more than CAD $13 billion and will support over 3,000 construction workers at peak and more than 300 operational jobs.” It’s reportedly Meta’s 33rd data center.
However, it’s not clear from the blog post if CEO Mark Zuckerberg can personally supervise construction of this data center. I hope you’ll forgive the detour, but:
In 2019, Zuckerberg was subpoenaed by Canada’s parliament in order to testify before the privacy and ethics committee of Canada’s House of Commons. He disobeyed the subpoena, and subsequently received an open-ended summons. That summons means that if Zuckerberg ever enters Canada for any reason, he’s legally required to testify before Parliament or face the possibility of a contempt charge. It’s not clear if this summons is still active.
I thought about this bit of ancient Mark Zuckerberg history recently when I read that Zuck’s $300 million megayacht, named Launchpad, was spotted near Canadian soil, just before a World Cup game in Vancouver on June 18. But the vessel had just spent several days in Seattle, so it wasn’t clear if that was evidence of a soccer fan risking an international incident to watch Canada annihilate Qatar, or, perhaps just Zuck’s crew shopping for cheap sundries on the opposite side of the U.S. border.
The Zuckerberg-Canada trivia rabbit hole gets weirder, however, because Meta was originally a Canadian AI company before Zuckerberg owned it. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s philanthropic initiative, CZI, paid an undisclosed sum for Meta, an AI-based science research startup founded by Canadian siblings Sam and Amy Molyneux in Toronto in 2010. CZI then transferred ownership of Meta’s brand assets to Facebook during that company’s rebrand to Meta.
Also, a 2023 law in Canada called the Online News Act requires Google and Meta to pay the Canadian news media when their tech platforms serve their news content. Meta responded by blocking news for Canadians on its platforms. To this day, if you’re in Canada and you look for news on Facebook or Instagram, you can’t get it. According to the New York Times, searching news terms on those platforms in Canada mostly just gets you right-wing memes and political parties’ video ads.
Gizmodo reached out to Meta on Wednesday night for information about Mark Zuckerberg’s legal status in Canada, but did not receive a reply.
