Canada's Data Centre Race

The competitive frontier of artificial intelligence has moved from models and chips to physical infrastructure: power, land, fibre, water, and capital. Canada has the raw ingredient the rest of the world wants, an abundant and largely clean electricity supply, but converting that into a strategic advantage runs into constraints the marketing rarely mentions.

This series works through those constraints one at a time, grounded in a primary-source research dataset rather than press releases. A few threads run through all eleven chapters: power interconnection, not land or money, is the real bottleneck; where the clean grid is capped, developers are quietly falling back on natural gas; foreign hyperscalers still control most of the capacity; and the same megawatts could often do more for the economy somewhere else.

Every figure is cited. Where the data is partial, estimated, or disputed, we say so rather than paper over it.

Updated August 23, 2026.The series has been revised against CBRE’s H2 2025 data-centre research, which reports Toronto and Montreal on the same basis as the U.S. markets for the first time. Toronto (315.0 MW) and Montreal (229.5 MW) now carry tracked colocation inventory rather than estimates, Northern Virginia is stated as dated figures rather than a range, the tracked project set is 20 rather than 18, and the metro figures are explicitly distinguished from the federal 337 MW AI-specific estimate. Revised chapters carry a dated update note at the end.