Do you find yourself, like me, reading the American news in horrified fascination, finding some comfort in the knowledge that I don’t live there, I live here, in Canada, where, we tend to believe, most things are pretty good? 

Until plumes of smoke from out-of-control forest fires in northwestern Ontario started billowing in my blithely unaware windows last week. It’s no safer here than anywhere else. Whatever is happening in America is happening right here, too. Just generally in stealthier fashion. 

Take data centres, for example. They are a good thing to pay attention to because they are actual physical infrastructure. They reveal in concrete terms the price that we are paying for AI. 

Until very recently, AI was being offered completely free, like air and water and Google and Meta. 

It is stealing its way into our lives, writing an email here, a text message there, an unopposable, ubiquitous force. But that cannot go on forever. The tech companies have started trying to charge for the chatbots. That will be interesting. 

But back to the data centres. 

They are, of course, coming to Canada. And the way they are coming is worth paying attention to. 

Nobody knows the full extent of what is happening or where. The public discussion has had little to go on. But two York University researchers from the Schulich School of Business, Prof. Lyndsey Rolheiser and Dr. Alexander Carlo, have just mapped the data centers already operating as well as those coming to Canada. 

Their report is a revelation.

It shows that there are about 200 centers operating already, and that number promises to double in the next five years. Everything that is on the way, the new breed of data centre, if you will, is absolutely nothing like what is here already. 

Using proprietary data sets, and matching those with permitting and approval records, utility filings and company disclosures, the report tracks data centre proposals, those under construction, and those already in operation. It then uses the census and provincial electricity data to pinpoint location, scale, and energy requirements.

The most important thing is the size. Everything in the pipeline is at least ten times bigger than usual. 

Right now, there are 194 data centres in Canada with a combined capacity of 1.6 gigawatts (GW). 

The report documents 213 new projects either in the proposal stages or already under construction. Almost all in Alberta. Together, they will offer 22.2 GW. Nearly 14 times what is already here. 

But that is not the whole picture. Canada’s existing data centres have an average capacity of 11.3 megawatts (MW). The new centres will have 122 MW. More than ten times larger. 

A 122 MW data centre, operating at 80 percent capacity, consumes enough electricity to power 78,000 Canadian households.

That is seven times the electrical demand of PEC, which has about 11,500 households. It is three times the demand generated by the city of Belleville, which has about 24,000 households. It is larger even than the entire Kingston metropolitan area, which has 74,000 households. 

It might be easier to visualize it. An alarming story this spring was about a data centre the size of Manhattan, 14,000 acres. There was another about a data centre twice the size of Manhattan. They are the first wave in the AI revolution. 

Existing data centers in Canada take up, on average, 13 acres. Projects currently under construction average 76 acres. Facilities in the proposal stage here — the majority of which are hyperscale, American AI projects — average nearly 2,000 acres.

These averages conceal the outliers, which are many times larger. The Schulich Report details facilities coming to Canada that are 400 MW. That’s more than 3x the average size of 122MW, which is, remember, already ten times larger than existing data centres.

But there is more. A few days after the York Report was published on July 3, Meta announced a $13 billion Sturgeon River facility, also in Alberta, that will consume 1 Gigawatt, enough to power 800,000 homes. The power will come from an on-site natural gas power facility. 

Ontario, BC, and Quebec, which have mostly clean power generation, either hydro or nuclear, have already moved to restrict these kinds of projects from hooking up to their grids. There is just not enough available supply to power them. 

Alberta, however, has its door wide open. It is seeking $100 billion in private investment over five years. Never mind that it has severe water constraints and a grid reliant on fossil fuels. 

“Alberta’s electricity sector is associated with the largest aggregate emissions footprint in Canada, accounting for approximately 21.9 million tonnes of CO2e in 2024, compared with 13.2 Mt CO2e in Saskatchewan and 10.5 Mt CO2e in Ontario.”

Dirty power? That is AI’s siren song. Alberta is the new it-place for data centres because it allows companies to bring their own power. BYOP, it’s called, and it means on-site power generation from natural gas. That option is attracting investment to regions that used to be considered unviable. See the bit about no water, above. 

“Alberta accounts for 92% of planned capacity (in MW) despite a grid emissions intensity nearly three times the national average and disproportionately high exposure to local water risk,” the report notes.

If Alberta can’t literally become the 51st state through a referendum, or constitutionally, or whatever, it has found another way. 

The companies behind the new hyperscale generation of data centers are almost all foreign-owned. Over 85 percent of the large projects with identified owners are American, but about a third of the new projects are of unknown origin. Companies can get quite deep into the approval process before anybody knows who they are, our reporters write. 

We are all invested in this. Literally. Canada’s largest pension funds, from the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), to the Public Sector Pension (PSP), Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), Caisse de d.p.t et placement du Quebec (CDPQ), the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), and the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP), are all heavily invested in tech stocks —and, therefore, data centres.

Nothing is “over there” anymore. It’s here. It’s everywhere.