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A massive data centre to provide computing power for artificial intelligence is under pre-construction just outside Port Hawkesbury in Cape Breton.
EverWind Fuels said it will build the facility in two stages, with the first phase to come online by the end of 2027 and the second in 2028.
The company, headed by Australian-American private equity veteran Trent Vichie, had previously confirmed it has data centre ambitions, but said little else.
On Friday, EverWind released more information about its plans.
The company is building the facility and has signed an agreement with an as-yet unnamed AI company to lease the first phase for a term of at least 20 years.
The first phase would have a capacity of 95 megawatts and the second, 325 megawatts, for a total of 420 megawatts. Nova Scotia’s current electrical generating capacity is close to 3,000 megawatts.
EverWind raising $8 billion for project
EverWind said it will pay for any required upgrades to Nova Scotia’s electricity system.
“Nova Scotians should expect us to demonstrate that we can protect ratepayers, safeguard local resources and deliver lasting community benefits, and we intend to be accountable for those commitments,” Vichie said in a news release.
EverWind said it is raising $8 billion in private capital to fund the project and an additional $2 billion for four of the onshore wind farms it is planning to build.
It said those wind farms would eventually support the data centre’s electricity needs, but existing generation on the provincial grid would be the primary supply to begin. Company officials said the provincial grid operator has done a system-impact study that indicates the grid can support the first phase.
EverWind’s data centre will be in Point Tupper, just outside Port Hawkesbury. (Tom Ayers/CBC)
EverWind has been trying to develop renewable energy projects in Nova Scotia for several years. It says those plans remain unchanged.
The data centre is to be built at the same site as one of EverWind’s other proposed projects — a green hydrogen and ammonia facility — in the industrial park at Point Tupper, Cape Breton.
Data centre controversies
Data centres have become a flashpoint across Canada, especially those that power AI, because they can have huge footprints and require vast amounts of energy and water for cooling. Concerns about AI’s potential impacts on jobs and dire warnings about risks to human existence also have some people pushing back.
There are some proposed data centres that would dwarf this one in size, including the Wonder Valley data centre in Alberta — the first phase of which is meant to be more than a gigawatt — but this project is still on the larger end of facilities that have been recently announced in Canada.
EverWind said it has signed on to Ottawa’s responsible data centre development principles — a set of non-binding guidelines the federal government released last month.
Trent Vichie, CEO of Everwind, spoke at the event. (Tom Ayers/CBC)
Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston recently laid out similar guidelines. Both levels of government say they expect any data centre to have local benefits, minimal environmental impact and minimal water use, and for there to be no resulting power rate spikes.
“We applaud the federal and provincial governments for setting high standards for responsible development,” Vichie said in the release. “And we will continue to work with communities to ensure that our work meets their expectations.”
WATCH | Prime minister’s parliamentary secretary speaks at announcement:
$10 billion private investments in Nova Scotia to include AI data centre
The prime minister’s parliamentary secretary, Kody Blois, says $10-billion investments in an AI computing data centre and wind projects to help power it show that Nova Scotia has set the ‘conditions’ to draw private sector development.
EverWind said it will use a closed-loop water-glycol system. The company’s preliminary estimate for water usage is an average of 100,000 litres per day for the first phase and 500,000 litres of water per day including both phases.
Water would be drawn from nearby Landrie Lake. The provincial regulator has approved the Landrie Lake Water Utility to withdraw 34 million litres from the lake each day, which would make EverWind’s daily requirements about one per cent of the total safe withdrawal volume.
The company promised the data centre would come with a community benefit program worth tens of millions of dollars. A specific dollar figure was not provided. Local communities and the data centre’s unnamed customer would consult on how to spend the money.
A consortium of Mi’kmaw communities, fronted by Membertou First Nation, is negotiating a nine per cent equity stake in the project.
Nova Scotia’s Ecology Action Centre said the Cape Breton data centre project poses more questions than it answers.
“When you’re going to build a project of this size and this scale in a province as small as Nova Scotia — in a province where we have some of the highest electricity rates in the country, where we have some of the highest rates of energy poverty in the country, where we have limited supplies in terms of our ground water and where our grid still runs on about one third coal in terms of our energy supply — I think we have some questions about how it’s going to work,” Thomas Arnason McNeil, the centre’s policy advocate on grid decarbonization, told CBC News.
“What’s going to be done potentially to protect and insulate ratepayers in this case, what this could mean for grid stability and water usage and we don’t have the answer to all those questions yet,” he said. “We can reserve judgement to a certain degree but at the same time, there will need to be analysis and work that is done in terms of quantifying the impact on ratepayers and understanding what the environmental impacts of the project will be.”
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