Is there a network backbone running through the middle of nowhere northern Québec and Ontario?
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.