The company behind Claude could be coming to Sturgeon County.
Anthropic is negotiating to lease a massive AI data centre campus about seven kilometres east of Gibbons, northeast of Edmonton, The Globe and Mail reported Friday, citing two sources who weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The San Francisco company is in talks with Calgary-based developer Beacon Data Centers.
Neither company would comment. No lease has been announced.
The project has already cleared a big hurdle, though. On Oct. 23, the Alberta Utilities Commission approved, with conditions, a 920-megawatt natural gas plant built to power the campus.
If Anthropic signs, it would be the second global tech giant to plant a huge AI campus in Sturgeon County this year, after Meta.
What’s planned east of Gibbons
The project is the Beacon Heartland campus, on about 320 acres of heavy industrial land in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland.
It would have four data halls built for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, drawing about 800 megawatts under normal operation. Beacon is targeting fall 2027 for the first operations.
That’s an enormous amount of power for one site. Running flat out for a full year, 800 megawatts adds up to about seven terawatt-hours of electricity. That’s our own calculation from the stated load, not a forecast. Real use will depend on how much equipment goes in and how fast the halls fill up.
A gas plant with 200 engines
The campus would make its own electricity instead of relying mainly on Alberta’s grid.
Heartland Power Generation LP, the company behind the plant, plans 200 natural gas engines of about 4.6 megawatts each, grouped into 40 modules of five. Together they add up to about 920 megawatts, roughly 120 megawatts more than the campus’s planned operating load.
Construction is targeted to start in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the plant running by late 2027. Those are targets, not guarantees.
The AUC approval covers the power plant only. It says nothing about a lease with Anthropic. Sturgeon County has separately issued a master development permit for the campus.
How many jobs it could create
Beacon projects more than 1,500 construction jobs and up to 300 permanent operating jobs at its campuses, according to its Heartland project page.
Those are the developer’s projections, not jobs created or independently verified.
Building a gas plant and four data halls would mean work for electricians, pipefitters, equipment operators, engineers and other trades. The permanent jobs would run and maintain the data centre and the power plant. Beacon also points to work for local suppliers, engineering firms and telecom companies.
Beacon hasn’t announced what the campus will cost to build.
How much water it would use
Beacon estimates the campus and power plant together could use up to 1,500 cubic metres of water a day. That’s about 1.5 million litres a day at the top end.
The company says it plans to use municipal and industrial water, not agricultural irrigation supplies. Its power plant design uses air-cooled radiators, and Beacon says it’s looking at closed-loop cooling and reusing treated wastewater, both of which would cut water use.
Separately, Sturgeon County is planning an industrial water intake on the North Saskatchewan River, budgeted at about $16.6 million, so industry can use untreated river water instead of treated drinking water. That’s a regional project, not a dedicated supply for Anthropic.
The real number won’t be known until the campus is running.
Alberta’s growing AI data centre hub
Heartland is one of dozens of data centre projects proposed, under construction or running across Alberta. You can see them all on our Alberta data centre tracker.
The closest comparison is next door. In July, Meta announced its $13-billion AI data centre in Sturgeon County, its first in Canada, in the same industrial corridor as Beacon’s site.
The projects keep getting bigger. A $20-billion AI data centre called Malachite One has been proposed near Edson, with its own gas plant of roughly one gigawatt.
Kevin O’Leary’s Wonder Valley project near Grande Prairie has been promoted at up to $70 billion and has run into a legal fight. In August, Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation won a court ruling allowing its challenge over a water licence to go ahead. The ruling didn’t decide the dispute itself.
And northeast Edmonton could become one of North America’s largest data centre districts under a separate land proposal.
All of these projects are at different stages, and their announced figures aren’t money already spent.
Why Sturgeon County keeps landing them
The location has what these projects need: large industrial lots, natural gas pipelines already in the ground, and the Edmonton region’s construction workforce close by.
It’s also inside Alberta’s designated industrial zone in the Heartland, which was set up to coordinate infrastructure and speed up approvals for big industrial projects.
The county has been open about what it’s after. “The prize is the power plant itself,” Mark Morrissey, the county’s director of economic growth and innovation, said last year. “You can build large-scale (electricity) generation capacity in the designated industrial zone.”
Then there’s the grid. Alberta’s electricity system has been flooded with requests to connect large data centres. In 2025, the Alberta Electric System Operator limited the first round of large connections to 1,200 megawatts. That was a first-phase allocation, not a permanent ceiling, but it showed how hard it is to get on the grid quickly.
Building your own power plant skips that line. It doesn’t answer questions about gas supply, emissions or water.
Ottawa wants these projects too. The federal government is working to land large “sovereign” AI data centres in Canada. “Canada cannot compete in the AI economy without the infrastructure to back it up,” said Evan Solomon, the federal minister of artificial intelligence.
Anthropic already has a Canadian deal
Anthropic’s first confirmed Canadian lease was announced Oct. 16, with EverWind Fuels in Point Tupper, N.S.
The first phase there is 95 megawatts, targeted for late 2027. A second, 325-megawatt phase is planned for 2028, for a total of 420 megawatts. EverWind has outlined more than $10 billion in related investment, including wind energy.
At 800 megawatts, Beacon’s Heartland campus is almost twice the size of EverWind’s planned campus.
There’s an important difference, though. The Nova Scotia lease is confirmed. The Sturgeon County talks are not. Nobody has said how much of Beacon’s capacity Anthropic would take, for how long, or at what price.
Why Anthropic needs this much computing power
Every question asked of Claude runs on specialized chips in data centres, and training new models takes far more. Those chips need enormous amounts of electricity, cooling and networking.
Anthropic spent about US$7.3 billion on computing and infrastructure last year, roughly three times what it spent in 2024. In its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of a planned stock market listing, it says it has committed between US$525 billion and US$567 billion to future computing.
That’s why developers are proposing campuses measured in hundreds of megawatts.
For Alberta, the bigger question isn’t whether companies want to build here. It’s how many of these projects will actually land tenants, financing, approvals and the infrastructure to run.
Environmental review and pushback
The Heartland power plant has been through federal and provincial review.
On March 10, the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada announced that no further federal impact assessment was required. It found the potential effects “would be limited or addressed through existing federal and provincial legislative and regulatory frameworks.” Its review covered spills, waste management, Indigenous rights and traditional land use.
The AUC then approved the plant with conditions on Oct. 23.
Neither decision means no impact. A 920-megawatt gas plant will produce greenhouse gas emissions. Beacon says its design includes noise controls, water management and setbacks from neighbours, but it hasn’t published an emissions estimate.
Some people have objected to Beacon’s project directly. Public comments filed with the federal agency on Heartland include submissions titled “We do not want this” and “No Data Centres.”
The louder protests in the area have been about Meta’s separate campus. Dozens of people rallied in Morinville in August over water, power and climate concerns, and an analysis this summer estimated Meta’s project could add $267 to $462 a year to Alberta household power bills.
Read more: Meta’s Alberta Data Centre Could Add $462 a Year to Household Power Bills, Analysis Finds
Those concerns are about Meta’s project, not findings about Beacon’s.
What happens next
The approval of the 920 MW power plant is confirmed. The 800 MW campus is documented. Anthropic’s involvement is still a reported negotiation.
Whether it signs, how much of the site it would take, what the deal is worth and what the campus will cost are all unknown. Beacon is aiming for first operations in fall 2027.
If the deal goes through, Sturgeon County could end up home to two of the world’s biggest tech companies within the same few kilometres.
Sources
Alberta Utilities Commission: Beacon AI Centers Heartland Project, Proceeding 30518
Impact Assessment Agency of Canada: Beacon AI Centers Heartland Project
Sturgeon County: County Connections, Industrial Heartland Process Water Initiative
Government of Canada: Sovereign AI infrastructure release, May 11, 2026
Anthropic PBC: Form S-1, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
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