Pembina Pipeline Corp. and two partners have given the go-ahead to the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a natural gas plant serving a data centre customer.

Pembina, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management expect the cost of the project to come in at $4.6 billion.

The 932-megawatt plant would be built in Sturgeon County, part of Alberta’s Industrial Heartland region north of Edmonton, with startup targeted for the second half of 2030.

Data centres house the computer hardware required to power various tech applications, and their scale has ballooned with the boom in artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Alberta has been actively trying to court so-called hyperscale developers, like Meta and Google, to set up shop in the province, but its electricity grid currently does not have enough capacity to accommodate several such projects.

So, Alberta is prioritizing projects that build their own power generation, like what the Greenlight partners are providing.