The invasion of Meta’s data center in 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 is “opening the way” in what is supposed to be a one-gigawatt AI data center in Sturgeon County, part of the province of Alberta. That’s about 350 miles north of the US border, way up but not in the middle of nowhere. In fact, it’s just north of Edmonton, the northernmost city in North America with more than 1 million residents.
Alberta is a famously low-regulated environment, sometimes called “the Texas of Canada.” A spokesperson for Meta he told CNBC“This specific location met the factors we typically look for: good access to infrastructure, a strong electrical grid and energy access, a strong talent pipeline, and a great set of community partners that helped us move this project forward.”
This data center, Meta’s blog post states, “represents an investment of more than C$13 billion and will support more than 3,000 construction workers at peak and more than 300 operational jobs.” is supposedly Meta’s 33rd data center.
However, it is not clear from the blog post whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg can personally oversee the construction of this data center. I hope you forgive the detour, but:
In 2019, Zuckerberg was subpoenaed by Canada’s parliament to testify before the privacy and ethics committee of the Canadian House of Commons. He disobeyed the summonsand later received an open call. That subpoena means that if Zuckerberg ever enters Canada for any reason, he is legally required to testify before Parliament or face the possibility of a contempt charge. It is not clear if this call is still active.
I recently thought of this bit of old Mark Zuckerberg history when I read that Zuck’s $300 million megayacht, called Launchpad, was seen near Canadian soiljust before a World Cup match in Vancouver on June 18. But the ship had just spent several days in Seattle, so it was unclear whether that was evidence of a football 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 border from the United States.
However, the Zuckerberg-Canada trivia rabbit hole gets stranger because Meta It was originally a Canadian artificial intelligence company before Zuckerberg owned it. In 2018, the philanthropic initiative of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, CZI, paid an undisclosed sum for Meta, an AI-based scientific research startup founded by Canadian siblings Sam and Amy Molyneux in Toronto in 2010. CZI later transferred ownership of Meta brand assets to Facebook during that company’s rebranding to Meta.
Additionally, a 2023 law in Canada called the Online News Act requires Google and Meta to pay Canadian news outlets when their technology platforms offer their news content. Meta responded by block news for canadians on their 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 TimesSearching for news terms on those platforms in Canada mostly only returns right-wing memes and political party 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 response.
