The Responsible and Sustainable Digital Technology (Numérique responsable et soutenable, or NRS) collective and research and development centre COlab have taken stock of existing and planned data centres in Quebec, as well as estimating their electricity needs.
Experts from the two organizations identified and mapped 72 data centres currently operating in Quebec. Most are concentrated around Montreal and Quebec City. None of those data centres is currently being used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models for large conversational agents such as ChatGPT. Rather, they are data centres that make their computing and storage capacity available to private companies and Quebec Crown corporations, said Alexandre Theve, a research project manager with the NRS collective. Those data centres accounted for 3.1% of electricity sales in Quebec in 2025. Their computing, storage and networking equipment consumes significant amounts of electricity to operate, for cooling (since the equipment generates enormous amounts of heat) and for security.
More specifically, all of those data centres, including cryptocurrency-mining facilities, have signed contracts with Hydro-Québec totalling nearly 1,488 megawatts (MW), referred to as their “total installed capacity.” In other words, those data centres have asked Hydro-Québec to make approximately 1,500 MW of power available to them, roughly equivalent to the output of the Manic-5 generating station. But they do not use all of that capacity. Their actual consumption is in the range of 500 to 600 MW, or an average of about 30 per cent of that capacity over the course of a year, said Theve, who volunteered his time to help compile the inventory as part of the NRS, a citizen-led group.
US interests
The experts also sought to determine who owns those data centres. To do so, they identified the nationalities of the shareholders who control them. They found that only about one-third of the installed electrical capacity — in other words, about one-third of the computing capacity — is owned by Canadian interests: 572 MW out of 1,488 MW. Among the shareholders that are not Canadian, most are American, while a few are European (from the United Kingdom, Poland, France and the Netherlands).
“This figure gives us an idea of the computing capacity we have on our territory that is at least partly under Canadian sovereignty. It is an order of magnitude that is admittedly imperfect, since the fact that a Canadian shareholder appears on a company’s list of shareholders does not guarantee sovereignty. But it allows us to raise questions about control over those digital infrastructures, such as: what would be the risks and resilience capabilities if geopolitical tensions were to escalate with countries that own those infrastructures?” said the engineer specializing in energy and computing.
A growing presence
The report also identifies 12 data centres that are under construction or in the process of being built. None of those planned facilities is owned by Canadian companies or has Canadian shareholders, yet they will account for an additional 644 MW of power demand.
Based on Hydro-Québec documents, the two organizations project that electricity consumption by data centres will grow by more than 10 per cent annually. Hydro-Québec expects additional demand of between 300 MW and 1,100 MW on its grid from data centres that will be added by 2035.
The experts estimate that 25 per cent of the new generation capacity planned by Hydro-Québec under its Integrated Energy Resources Plan (PGIRE) through 2035 “will have to be devoted to data centres if we want to meet their energy needs. That would leave only 75 per cent of the new generation capacity for the needs of other industries,” Theve said. He stressed that the inventory brings together data intended to inform a democratic debate on “the issue of access to energy for data centres.”
