British Columbia proposed legislation to limit how much electricity will be available to artificial intelligence data centers, and moved to permanently ban new cryptocurrency mining projects.
The government of Canada’s third-most populous province will prioritize connections to its power grid for other purposes like mines and natural gas facilities because they provide more jobs and revenue for people in BC, the energy ministry said Monday.
“Other jurisdictions have been challenged to address electricity demands from emerging sectors and, in many cases, have placed significant rate increases on the backs of ratepayers,” the department said Monday.
That’s a reference to US states like Virginia and Maryland, where a proliferation of the power-hungry data centers needed for AI appears to be pushing up citizens’ power bills, according to a Bloomberg analysis. BC “is receiving significant requests for power” from these industries, Energy Minister Adrian Dix said at a press conference.
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Everyone is over thinking this. By having this ban in place, we ensure that people that live in the area have a stable priced supply of electricity. How would you feel when you woke up one day and the bill for your electricity was going to go up because some AI data centre was gobbling up all the supply that is available?
Some will argue…“but they’re paying customers too and we can make a profit!”. Perverse incentives. Electricity is an utility. Not a service. Get that in your heads. Why would we even want tech companies have any say in our utilities when they could possibly become the biggest customer to the power company? What? Are you thinking that those in government will “protect” you? We have all seen what lobbying can do.
While BC has a lot of renewables, but they are still not without a cost (hydro for example floods huge areas). If Alberta was smart (lol), this is where they could transition away from oil over time, alas, they have a plant.
All of you should go do some research on how much electricity these AI data centres are using. The amount is staggering. What’s even crazier is the amount of capital these tech companies have and are willing to deploy to “have it their way” - both physically and politically.
Why are they charging citizens for power used by AI and data centers? How is this not robbery?
Indirectly.
More power use means more demand, which drives up the price because everyone must make more profit – despite economies of scale and consolidation wins.
Ok, but the extra demand not from the public and not even from their customers. The extra demand is from no one but the AI and data companies themselves, since there the ones pushing for customers to use more data, more AI and more power. The public only wants more of that if prices stay the same and the power is from renewables.
It’s “market logic”, highest bidder sets the price.
That’s where regulation comes in: when the result is against the people’s interest (of keeping power bill from rising).
I agree. I’m just stating their reasoning for why they don’t consider it robbery.
Mining crypto is really only profitable when you have an abundance of renewable energy, so its a self-solving problem (unless your government is doing things very wrong by subsidizing fossil fuels)
Is it possible to use these power hogs to level demand so we can increase the power generated by Nuclear reactors (in the US portion of the grid) and decrease the utilization of gas turbines?
This can be done without inviting AI and crypto bros (the same people) into Canada. Electric car chargers can be required to follow a charging profile put out by the supply authority, then as people go to bed at night chargers can be ramped up and the base load increased.
That’s something that should be done, but involves a lot of installation points.
Maybe giving industrial power users time of use billing would help shift demand a bit too, but it’s not actually that big a deal for BC because hydro power output is quite dynamic. A bigger issue is probably shifting rainfall trends lowering existing reservoirs.
I seem to disagree with almost everybody here.
Canada is a natural place to locate huge data centres because it is cold. A huge expense for these data centres is cooling. They need less cooling in northern climates. They can be air cooled instead of liquid cooled. This means northern data centres are not only less expensive to operate but less expensive to build and also quite a lot simpler which means more reliable.
Let me pause here and say something to the environmentalists. They are going to build these data centres. Would you rather they build them somewhere hot where they need to consume far more energy? Why exactly? I do not understand that logic. And it is not just power. Water consumption is a massive problem in hotter climates as well? If we want to help the earth, build these in the north.
BC is a source of inexpensive renewable energy and plentiful water. It is the reason we have an aluminum industry even though we do not have the ore.
Finally, we have A LOT of space. We could have the worlds biggest data center and nobody would even know it was there.
So northern BC is an attractive place to build data centres.
Data centres are not huge job creators but they have other spinoff benefits.
But the real reason to want them is precisely that they demand so much electricity. Electricity is a product. That is taxable. We should build out our renewable energy capacity and sell it to them. We do not have to subsidize the electricity to be an attractive location (see above). We can make money.
We understand that money underlies all our other priorities right? You cannot think of something you would like funded?
And we could require or advantage the use of Canadian technology (which this demand could advance). Doesn’t Tenstorrent make their LLM cards in Quebec? Their R&D Center is in Toronto. Having big customers in Canada could bring more of that North.
And we should really have sovereign infrastructure to boot. I for one do not want all this information being shipped, processed, and managed abroad. We should keep it here.
This post is too long to have this argument but LLMs are also critical to a functioning economy and basic scientific research moving forward. People who think AI means “shitty chat bots” have no idea what they are talking about. Medical science has already been massively advanced as an example. We do not want these discoveries coming out of UBC?
Honestly, I just don’t get this thread at all. But if this is what people think, I guess it makes sense for the government to feed off that.
But this seems like seems like it is really about mining and natural gas. Hard to argue that makes this decision pro-climate. I mean, if you want to sell more natural gas, I am sure natural gas electricity generation for power hungry data centers is a good plan for that. Win win?
But let me sneak in that I certainly do not want to see rates go up for electricity in BC. I just don’t see why it has to. Increase our capacity. Charge the data centers for what the use. If anything, that will allow us to move to more renewable sources overall which should actually bring rates down for everybody.
Look, just use renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. It’s not about people being “environmentalists”, it’s about acknowledging that the amount of greenhouse gases is already rising too quickly. So if you insist on using fossil fuels, then your goal is to use fossil fuels, not to build the data centers. If on the other hand, your goal is to build a data center, then we’ll all be fine with renewable energy.
I’m glad it is clear to my government that we have far better uses for our clean energy than crypto and AI.
Thank goodness. Keep British Columbia safe from those power hungry monster ai centres.
Oh wow so there ARE actually some adults in the government? Suprising but nice to see. Hopefully the children don’t throw another tantrum and ruin it… Like usual
It’s not children throwing those tantrums.
It’s the sell-outs.
It’s always funny when we do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Clearly this is coming from LNG lobbyists, because it’s the BC industry that is most interested in gobbling up our energy matrix, and they don’t have the insane valuations and Venture Capital that would allow them to compete with Crypto and LLM players for energy deals.
But in this fight between monsters, I actually don’t mind taking the win of a province-wide kick in the balls of the Crypto industry because they have an outsized influence on Vancouver politics right now. And honestly, no relevant LLM training data-centers would be coming to BC anyway. Canada has no major players in the space and the US ones are treated pretty much as military-grade levels and they wouldn’t dare offshore that amid this bonkers administration. So I only see this as a win with very low risks of unintended bad consequences.
While economically relevant right now, those kinds of projects are always a long term fuckup for whatever small town they decide to latch onto. Uprooting the only economic backbone of entire communities, they are most often short term gains for a few.
As a resident of BC, I don’t see why a ban is necessary.
Just set the price for those use cases high enough to both limit and make a significant profit off it, then use that profit to build out more clean energy infrastructure in the province (Solar, Wind, maybe another Dam if it makes sense)
Why? What value does Bitcoin mining bring to BC?
the air conditioning industry booming /s
Profit selling electricity?
I don’t care about the bitcoin, but if other people want to give us a large amount of money for electricity then we can just build more capacity with the profit and reduce the price for everyone else.
Electricity is only so profitable. And if it was so easy to spin up power to meet their demand, but clearly that didn’t happen, and is effecting residents.
That won’t limit anything, though. It will just make the collapse of our grid, more profitable for the governemnt.
That’s a confusing statement. BC Hydro is owned by the people of BC (I remember getting divided cheques in the mail after the Enron collapse when BC Hydro was covering the shortfalls in California) and “our grid” is the Pacific Grid, which will collapse the same way whether there is energy abuse in BC or not. It handles various smelters and US energy exports OK right now though.
Higher prices limit purchasing, that’s just standard economics.
If the grid is at risk of collapse, they just jack up the price such that everyone stops using it for those purposes.
The grid isn’t anywhere near risk of collapse though.
Higher prices limit purchasing, that’s just standard economics.
That ignores the profit motive behind those purchases. The increase in price will simply be passed along to the customer, and have no impact on how much power is used. It will simply get more expensive.
For bitcoin, the price of electricity directly impacts your profitability. You actually turn the miners off at a certain price point because they will lose you money. There’s no customer to pass it on to.
For AI, the companies are not profitable right now anyways, price for electricity will absolutely impact usage rates.
Besides, when we’re talking about grid collapse you’re referring to things like extreme weather events, you don’t need a ban to just turn off an AI datacenter for three days during a massive winter storm or heat dome.
I agree with this. Differentiate pricing, keeping it reasonable or even profitable for the public and incentivizing private capital to invest in building their own energy production for these uses so they get off the public grid, as long as that energy production is well-regulated and aligned with renewable energy transition goals.
… incentivizing private capital to invest in building their own energy production
That is a very bad idea. The last thing you want is companies having the ability to build hydro dams or small nuclear power generators.
AI and Bitcoin are NOT a requirement for people to live. Affordable potable water is.
Did you ignore the “well-regulated” bit, or you just don’t think that’s possible?
AI and bitcoin should also be treated as different issues, as the Province is doing.
Canada desperately needs sovereign AI data centers, owned and regulated by Canadians. We need a lot of investment in energy infrastructure to support this. It’s good to have regulation on energy use that protects consumers, but we also need to lean into sovereign AI capacity. If we don’t, we’re stuck as a resource colony just selling our natural resources to places that do all the value-adding work and then sell their high-end products and services back to us, and jobs currently being protected by these regulations will be automated by foreign-owned and controlled providers. 300MWs is a start, but will likely be consumed in no time. We need much more, and we need it owned and regulated by Canadians.
Sovereign AI for what use case? If we are going to be spending all this money on it, what is the return, other than one more shitty chat bot?
I gotta dispute the idea that we need AI data centers at all, let alone “sovereign” ones. What social purpose do they serve?
Spreading domestic propaganda
I can give you one use case that has a public benefit. My brother works in research informatics at a children’s hospital. They use ai to identify children with rare diseases. My understanding is it tracks patterns of appointments and symptoms and matches the patients with specialists. Typically these patients wouldn’t be identified for years because doctors are looking for common ailments before any exotic disease.
There is lots of uses for urban planning related to population growth and census statistics as well.
I’d be curious to see data on the benefits, but assuming what you say is true: this example in medicine sounds like a pretty basic kind of machine learning and not something that requires massive energy-hungry data centers.
Same with the urban planning example. These are not the applications that require “sovereign AI compute” at scale. Those would be the generative AI applications like chatbots and image/video generators, as far as I understand these things.
AI data centres are usually about giant LLMs and agentic bots. “Ai” as in machine learning doesn’t need giant data centres and has been progressing quite well without them.
The term “AI” tends to get thrown around to claim all the benefits of the entire field to excuse the excesses of a very narrow slice.
These applications are great, but they’re not what these compute centers are for. For those applications, a regular supercomputer will do. Those gigantic and power hungry data centers are used for LLM training, which is a VC-funded arms race that we don’t actually need to partake in.
There will to be huge demand for inference compute in Canada, both in the public and the private sector. It will be needed for Canadian companies to be competitive and for Canadian education and public services to keep up. If we don’t have data servers providing that inference, then we will depend upon it being provided by others, and we will just be creating deepened foreign dependencies across our public and private sectors. What we should have is Canadian resources feeding Canadian energy production, feeding Canadian data centers, feeding inference to Canadian companies and public sector, supporting Canadians and Canadian companies to be competitive.
This is a circular argument. “We need it because it is useful”. Useful for what? What, specifically, are the supposed social or productivity benefits from these data centers?
Inference compute is cheap and small. Training compute is power hungry and expensive.
Inference is what’s primarily driving demand. Training uses massive energy, but is a one-time use per model (for now). Inference is ongoing and scales with demand and model complexity. As demand has kept on climbing, and model complexity has too, inference energy demands are far more than training over time. That’s true even with big effenciency gains in models.
I don’t disagree, but your statement that there will be huge demand for inference compute doesn’t necessarily imply that we need to worry about compute centers buildout for that, because inference consumes much lower resources than training and most of the compute center buildout we’re seeing out there is for training, not inference.
inference energy demands are far more than training over time
In aggregate? Sure. But unlike training compute, it doesn’t need to be centralized/colocated and it’s way more energy efficient. If you were just making a case that we need more compute overall, I’d agree, I’d even say it’s near consensus. But that’s not what this legislation discussion is about. The subject here is power-hungry training infrastructure.
That was true a couple of years ago, but inference is the primary driver of data center build out now and expected to only increase over coming years. It’s true that Inference is cheap per token, and a lot of inference will move to the edge, but there will be even more demand for centralized compute to take the place of that with more complex and demanding models which can’t run on edge devices.
inference is the primary driver of data center build out now
Hmm maybe I’m not up to speed with latest developments then, but that sounds plausible.
