You’ve got a ton of water. A ton of famously cheap hydro electricity potential. An entire service industry for remote mines (who will build your roads and power). And you’re not being an unwanted bastard.
My sense is that the answer is very simple: because they can just use someone else’s.
If nothing works out domestically, this might very well be where the industry ends up.
The current attempt is to have domestic (in the continental US) AI - because owning the infrastructure is way more valuable than renting it.
The amount of surveyed untapped hydro potential is something like 110GW. Though to be fair I haven’t studied any of this too deeply since grad school (which I refuse to let my brain appraise how long ago that was.)
What I found interesting was that none of them had a single thing to say about the actual AI tech. Mind you n=6 or 7.
Whether they know who Anthropic or OpenAI or are familiar with AI tech is immaterial, they are allowed a say on what happens in their immediate environment regardless of the application of the DC. The environmental impact of datacenters is substantial, especially near residential areas.
> When I suggested “what about like an hour north of Sudbury?”
Timmins? Or somewhere along the 144? That's not going to work: that area is pretty much inaccessible a good chunk of the year, besides you won't find the personnel to man your DCs there. And to hook it up you'll be digging fairly long trenches adding quite a bit to the cost of deployment.
Take a peek at Churchill Falls NL. They’re upgrading it to something like 14,000MW. You can see the hydro corridor on the satellite imagery. It goes for hundreds of KM to get to the customers.
I’m just not convinced that the frontier logistics are a real problem for an industry that’s supposed to be worth trillions.
I was just wondering where you had planned this and Timmins is the biggest population center North of Sudbury that I'm aware of.
Is it somehow not being represented here?
> Compare to the US where the entire middle of the country is covered in PoPs measured in terabits per second
A problem if you're Netflix. Less so if you're Claude, where giant clusters of RAM and compute generate a few kilobytes of text leaving the datacenter at a time.
But it's the lines between that matter, yeah?
Again, your map would say datacenters in the Australian outback would be insane, but there's huge dark fiber capacity passing through it.
> I also think you're massively underestimating the amount of ingress/egress traffic needed for one of these facilities.
Ingress/egress for AI compute is clearly different than some other use cases. One needs only to watch Claude's network activity for evidence of this.
(Like, it's the least problematic part of the in-space datacenter idea, versus cooling and maintenance.)
You keep trying to slice and dice the maps to say that there is in fact stuff in Canada. I'm not disputing that Canadians have the internet. I'm debating that it would be possible to put datacenters in northern Ontario and Quebec without doing massive infrastructure projects to run new fiber a significant distance, likely to Quebec City or to the northern US.
If you think that's incorrect, and that there's actually existing fiber that would support this, I would be curious for you to say so directly. Otherwise, the maps seem clear: there's some connectivity in the coastal and southern areas you'd expect, but nothing inland and northern and nothing at the scale of the US midwest.
But that's... already on the map, and you described it as "a major presence" upthread?
> nothing at the scale of the US midwest
Again, I note the very different ingress/egress requirements of AI compute. The main bottleneck has been power, not bandwidth.
That said, I agree they should put them in Canada and similar regions, it seems like a no brainer resources-wise for the reasons you mentioned. The reason they don't is probably that it's vastly more expensive to work on remote sites like that. Mines and dams do it by necessity, but it's a big undertaking to build stuff a full day's drive (or bush plane flight) from the nearest city.
But they also want to build an on premise 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain.
It feels like at some point our society forgot that the government is supposed to pass laws, and not just block things we don't like. Data centers are being built with polluting power sources, why is the instinct "stop all the data centers" and not simply, you know, require them to not use polluting power sources?
Also, while I'm glad you're focused on what matters, 90% of the outcry I've heard about DCs is about water. Or noise pollution, or them looking ugly... for buildings that, again, are mostly being built on razed industrial land or empty fields. According to the OP, "electrical grid" is the fifth most common concern, and air pollution is wayy down the list.
As far as power plants go, to march the current estimates for data center demand over the next decade are astronomical. A large percentage of that power generation is going to be natural gas and biomass. You can’t really build these massive data centers on the timescale needed without them.
Is it stupid lump in a small data center with these massive projects? Yes it is.
Yeah, I'm not saying I'm on their side. We shouldn't be building at a pace that can only be enabled by new fossil fuel plants, correct. But the problem is the power plant, not the DC itself.
I'm also not convinced that gas/biomass plants are the only way. They're an easy way, sure, but solar these days is very cheap and quick to install. And these companies have a lot of money to burn! It feels like we have a great opportunity to force some very rich entities to build out renewable power and instead we're all wringing our hands about DCs sucking up water and looking ugly. It's all kind of a waste.
EDIT: Also, a big reason for the on-site power plants afaik is because grid/transmission construction takes forever. It'd be nice if we could actually fix that, perhaps with all this new money flowing in, but y'know...