Mapping Canada’s Data-Centre Boom

A boom you can count

It is easy to feel that Canada is being paved over with data centres. The way to check that feeling is to count. Our project dataset tracks 18 distinct Canadian builds, each tagged with a status, and the shape of that count is the first finding.

Of the 18, only 5 are existing and operating. Another 7 are under construction, 5 are proposed, and 1 is under review. Put plainly, more than two-thirds of the map is a promise rather than a building. The existing tier is also the least glamorous part: it is mostly the three American hyperscalers’ cloud regions (AWS Canada Central in Montreal, AWS Canada West in Calgary, Google Cloud Toronto), plus TELUS’s Rimouski AI factory and Vantage’s Montreal campuses. The gigawatt-scale names that dominate the headlines are all in the proposed or under-construction tiers.

The corridors

Sorted by geography, the activity clusters into four corridors and one outlier. Each corridor is anchored by a different mix of power, fibre, and cloud demand.

• Greater Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe. The Ontario end of the map is cloud, not campus. Google Cloud’s Toronto region is operating, and Microsoft’s CA$19 billion Azure expansion (2023 to 2027) is putting new capacity into Toronto and Quebec City. The corridor’s headline conflict is the denied Steelport severance on Hamilton’s harbourfront.
• Greater Montreal and Quebec. The deepest operating base in the country. AWS Canada Central and three Vantage Montreal campuses (about 91 MW) already run, QScale is building a 142 MW campus in Lévis, Vantage is adding an 86 MW campus in Quebec City, and TELUS runs its Rimouski sovereign AI factory. All of it draws on Hydro-Québec’s near-100-percent renewable grid.
• Alberta. The epicentre of the new build and of the controversy, with 9 of the 18 projects. It holds both the largest single proposal on the map (Wonder Valley) and the largest project under construction (Meta’s Sturgeon County site). Almost everything here leans on on-site natural gas.
• The Lower Mainland and interior B.C. Anchored by the TELUS and Westbank sovereign AI cluster, an 85 MW build split across Kamloops and Vancouver, drawing on BC Hydro power and scaling toward 150 MW by 2032.

The outlier is New Brunswick, where the Beacon and VoltaGrid proposal at Lorneville near Saint John sits under review, a 390 MW site split between an on-site gas plant and the NB Power grid. It has no corridor around it, which is part of why it is so contested locally.

The flagship projects, tagged by status

Here is the map at its largest scale, grouped by province and always carrying a status tag. The single rule is that a proposed gigawatt is not an operating megawatt.

• Alberta, proposed: Wonder Valley (O’Leary Ventures, near Grande Prairie), up to 7.5 GW and about CA$70 billion at full buildout, off-grid gas; the Beacon AI Foothills, Chestermere, and Indus campuses, two of them rated 400 MW and Indus proposing 1,494 MW of on-site gas generation; and the small 10 MW AVAX One micro-grid.
• Alberta, under construction: Meta’s Sturgeon County site, 1 GW and more than CA$13 billion, powered by an on-site gas plant (the Greenlight Electricity Centre) plus a grid connection; eStruxture CAL-3, 90 MW with CoreWeave as anchor tenant; and the Bitdeer Fox Creek crypto facility, about 100 MW on a 101 MW on-site gas plant.
• Alberta, existing: AWS Canada West, the Calgary cloud region, launched in December 2023.
• Quebec, under construction: QScale’s 142 MW Lévis campus and Vantage’s 86 MW Quebec City campus, both on Hydro-Québec power.
• Quebec, existing: Vantage’s Montreal campuses (about 91 MW), AWS Canada Central, and the TELUS Rimouski sovereign AI factory.
• Ontario: Google Cloud’s Toronto region (existing) and the Microsoft Azure expansion (under construction, spanning Toronto and Quebec City).
• British Columbia, under construction: the 85 MW TELUS and Westbank sovereign AI cluster in Kamloops and Vancouver.
• New Brunswick, under review: the 390 MW Beacon and VoltaGrid site at Lorneville.

Announced gigawatts, operating megawatts

Now the credibility gap, stated in numbers. What is actually energized and serving load in Canada is measured in hundreds of megawatts, concentrated in three metros: Toronto at roughly 312 MW, Montreal at roughly 200 MW by estimate, and Calgary at roughly 125 MW. A federal pitch deck put the country’s current AI data-centre capacity at about 337 MW. Those are the real numbers.

The announced numbers live in a different unit. That same federal deck counted more than 20 GW of projects under planning or development nationally, and Canada’s AI strategy estimates commercial demand around 5.5 GW by 2030. A single proposed campus, Wonder Valley, carries a headline figure of up to 7.5 GW on its own, more than twenty times the entire operating base. The temptation is to add these up into a Canadian total. That would be a mistake, and it is the mistake this whole chapter is written against.

Proposal megawatts are not fungible with operating megawatts. Many of the largest numbers on the map are exempt from or pending regulatory review, dependent on gas plants that are not yet built, and stacked into an interconnection queue that cannot clear. The honest way to read the map is two-layered: a thin, real, mostly clean operating base in Quebec, Ontario, and B.C., and a vast, speculative, mostly Albertan proposal layer sitting on top of it.

Alberta is the epicentre, and it runs on gas

Half the map is in one province. Alberta holds 9 of the 18 projects, and it holds them for a specific reason: developers there have stopped waiting for a grid connection and started building their own power. Wonder Valley, the Beacon Indus campus, Bitdeer Fox Creek, AVAX One, and Meta’s Sturgeon County site are all designed around on-site natural gas rather than the clean grid.

The bottleneck behind that choice is stark. By early 2026 data centres had requested 21,085 MW of grid connection from the Alberta Electric System Operator, more than 90 percent of the province’s entire existing generating capacity, against an interim cap that allows only about 1,200 MW of new large load to connect through 2028. The door is 1,200 MW wide and already fully allocated. So the Alberta cluster on this map is really a map of gas plants with data centres attached, which is exactly the inversion the power chapter examines in detail.

The project-type mix

Sorted by type rather than geography, the 18 projects break into 9 AI campuses, 4 hyperscale sites, 4 cloud regions, and 1 crypto facility. That looks like an AI-dominated map, and in ambition it is. But the type labels deserve suspicion at the edges.

Some of the “AI campus” entries are crypto-to-AI pivots. AVAX One is a 10 MW micro-grid that pivoted from crypto, still at the front-end engineering stage. Bitdeer Fox Creek is classed as crypto in our data but built with an AI-ready design, the kind of dual-purpose framing that lets a bitcoin build present as an AI investment. The four cloud regions, meanwhile, are the most solid entries on the map precisely because they are the least new: AWS, Google, and Microsoft footprints that were expanding for enterprise cloud long before the AI boom. Reading the type mix honestly means separating genuine hyperscale AI (Meta, eStruxture with CoreWeave) from cloud infrastructure that has been relabelled AI, and from crypto that has been repositioned as AI.

The rejections are part of the map

A map of announcements would miss the projects that did not survive contact with a regulator or a community. Those rejections are as much a feature of the Canadian boom as the flagship builds.

• Synapse, Olds, Alberta (rejected). A roughly $10 billion project, which would have been Canada’s largest, tied to a 1.4 GW gas plant. The Alberta Utilities Commission denied the application in March 2026, citing missing information and inadequate public consultation. The proponent can reapply.
• Hyperscale campus near Winnipeg, Manitoba (rejected). A proposed 500 MW site that the premier turned down, saying hyperscale data centres did not appear to be in the best interests of Manitobans given energy demand and environmental cost against limited benefit.
• Steelport, Hamilton, Ontario (denied, under appeal). The committee of adjustment denied the land severance for a feared waterfront data centre after roughly 1,688 public comments, and the city moved toward a moratorium. The developer is appealing.
• Wonder Valley, Alberta (advancing, but review waived). Not a rejection but its inverse: the province deemed the up-to-7.5-GW campus exempt from a provincial environmental impact assessment, a decision that is itself the controversy.

The pattern is that Canadian communities and regulators are winning some fights and losing others, and the outcomes cluster by province. Alberta approves and exempts; Manitoba and Nova Scotia defer or refuse outright; Ontario and New Brunswick fight it out parcel by parcel.

The takeaway

Draw the map honestly and it splits into two layers that should never be added together. The bottom layer is small, real, and mostly clean: a few hundred megawatts of operating capacity in Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary, anchored by cloud regions and a handful of Quebec campuses on hydro power. The top layer is enormous, speculative, and mostly Albertan: more than 20 GW of proposals, led by a single 7.5 GW campus, much of it gas-powered, several projects exempt from or pending review, and a real count of rejections underneath.

The corridors tell you where the two layers meet. Quebec and Ontario carry the operating base on clean grids. Alberta carries the proposal layer on private gas. British Columbia is trying to build a sovereign cluster inside a capped allocation. And everywhere the same discipline applies: tag every project by status, deduplicate the phases and rebrands, and never let a press-release gigawatt masquerade as an operating one. Do that, and the boom is real but far smaller, far more concentrated, and far less clean than the headline numbers suggest.

This piece was originally published as the third chapter of Canada’s Data Centre Race on Zeever.ca. Read the full eleven-part series there for the complete analysis and every cited figure.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many data centres does Canada actually have, and how many are just announced?

In our project dataset of 18 tracked builds, only 5 are existing and operating: AWS Canada Central (Montreal), AWS Canada West (Calgary), Google Cloud Toronto, TELUS’s Rimouski sovereign AI factory, and Vantage’s Montreal campuses. Another 7 are under construction, 5 are proposed, and 1 is under review. So the operating base is small and the pipeline is dominated by projects that are announced rather than built.

Where are Canada’s data centres concentrated?

Four corridors. The Greater Toronto and Golden Horseshoe area holds the Google and Microsoft cloud footprint. Greater Montreal and Quebec hold AWS Canada Central, Vantage, and QScale. Alberta is the epicentre of the new build, with 9 of the 18 projects. The Lower Mainland and interior British Columbia hold the TELUS sovereign AI cluster. New Brunswick sits outside those corridors as a contested single proposal.

What is the gap between announced gigawatts and operating megawatts?

Real operating capacity is measured in hundreds of megawatts: Toronto around 312 MW, Calgary around 125 MW, and Montreal around 200 MW by estimate. A federal pitch deck put current AI data-centre capacity at roughly 337 MW. The announced pipeline, by contrast, is measured in tens of gigawatts, more than 20 GW nationally, led by a single proposed Alberta campus of up to 7.5 GW. Those proposal numbers should never be summed as if they were operating.

How much of the boom is real AI versus crypto or cloud?

By type, our 18 projects split into 9 AI campuses, 4 hyperscale sites, 4 cloud regions, and 1 crypto facility. But the labels blur at the edges. Some AI campuses are crypto-to-AI pivots, such as the small AVAX One micro-grid, and the Bitdeer Fox Creek site is a crypto build with an AI-ready design. Tagging each project by its real stage and real use is the only way to read the map honestly.

Which Canadian data-centre projects have been rejected or paused?

Several. The Alberta Utilities Commission rejected the roughly $10 billion Synapse project near Olds in March 2026 for missing information and inadequate consultation. Manitoba’s premier rejected a proposed 500 MW hyperscale campus near Winnipeg. Hamilton’s committee of adjustment denied the Steelport land severance tied to a feared waterfront data centre, now under appeal, and the city moved toward a moratorium. The map includes its own rejections.