Data centres, facilities that can store massive amounts of digital information, have become a hot topic across North America.
Much of the political debate is about the role the centres play in powering large language models, and the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools.
These campuses, which can span multiple buildings, require substantial resources, including electricity, storage space and sometimes, water. As a result, they can have a significant impact on the communities in which they’re built.
While Canada has been slower than the U.S. when it comes to rollout, the pace of data centre announcements has picked up across the country.
That raises the question for many Canadians: Where are all those data centres going to be built?
To answer that question, The Globe and Mail has mapped the locations of current and future data centres in Canada, with the help of Vancouver-based research firm Aterio.
Many of the active data centres in Canada house digital information that’s unrelated to AI, such as banking transactions, health information and government files. However, the explosion of LLMs such as Claude and ChatGPT – not to mention domestic AI initiatives – requires an enormous amount of data and more space to store it. That’s fuelling some of the current build-out.
Residents of areas where these data centres are proposed have been pushing back. In August, the Ontario city of Oakville enacted a one-year moratorium on data-centre development in the region, so it can study resource requirements and potential effects on noise and pollution.
Data is governed in part by the laws and policies of the country where the physical infrastructure is located and by those in which the company collected or generated, although there is some disagreement on how much the physical location of the data matters.
This concept of “data sovereignty” is being widely debated and has become a key priority for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government as it navigates economic threats from the United States. Data centres in Canada would allow Ottawa more control over how that data is regulated, stored and used.
Ottawa’s bid for sovereign telecom faces costly, complex challenges, experts say
Is there a data-centre campus planned for your community? Use the tool below to search your postal code and find data centres that are active, proposed and under construction near you. (The Globe does not store your postal code.)
Data centres that are likely to support AI are marked with a star, and those that are more likely to be used for other storage needs are represented by a solid-coloured dot. Delayed projects are those where construction began but has since been stopped. AI capability is determined by reviewing public disclosures, and the projects meeting a threshold for this capability are flagged as such.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that data is governed by the laws and policies of the country where the physical infrastructure is located. This concept of “data sovereignty,” is being widely debated, and the laws of the country where a data centre is located determine only in part how the data is governed.