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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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.