Jobs
The construction phase is large. The permanent workforce is small.
Both framings below are arithmetically true, and most coverage picks one. We show both, and we name who each figure comes from.
More than 3,000 construction jobs, more than 300 permanent.
Meta and the province put the Sturgeon County project at 3,000+ construction workers at peak, 300+ permanent jobs, and about $250M/year in government revenue. Those figures are theirs, not independently verified.10
About $43 million of investment per permanent job.
Run the same numbers the other way and that is the ratio one analyst reached. And academics say plainly that no independent benefit study exists, every figure traces to a party with an interest.11
What comes back
What does a gigawatt of data centre return to Alberta?
Not royalties, taxes, land, power sales and jobs.
Albertans are used to resource royalties flowing back to the province. Data centres are a different model, and we do not yet have an honest comparison against a similar slice of oil and gas that we trust. We are not going to invent one.
Communities
Zoning and local consent now decide as much as power does
Rocky View County voted a campus down six to one.
After residents organized, councillors rejected a roughly 1,100-acre campus.9 The province has run town-hall sessions where water, noise, farmland and emissions came up repeatedly.11 Whether a project happens increasingly depends on the community that would host it.
See every source on Citations, and where projects stand on the tracker.