Jul. 9 at 3:58 PM
I keep seeing the AI trade discussed like it begins and ends with GPUs, but Meta’s new Alberta project made me stop for a second. A C
$13B data center, starting at 1 GW and potentially scaling to 1.8 GW. That is roughly the electricity demand of 800,000 homes. At that scale, AI is no longer just a software or semiconductor story. It is a power-generation, grid, cooling, transformer, natural-gas and copper story wearing an AI label.
I’m starting to spend more time looking at the companies supplying the physical buildout.
$META gets the headline, but names like
$VRT and
$PWR may feel the bottlenecks first. It is also why I keep an eye on early-stage copper names like
$NRED.CSE. They are much further out on the risk curve, but every new data-center announcement makes the need for credible future copper supply harder to ignore.
What becomes scarce before the GPUs do: power, transformers, cooling equipment or copper?
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-build-c13-billion-alberta-data-center-its-first-canada-2026-07-08/
