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.