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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Hmm maybe I’m not up to speed with latest developments then, but that sounds plausible.
It’s what makes it such a critical need. Canadian companies, individuals, public services etc will all have a growing demand for inference and it will still largely be coming from centralized servers. If we are not serving that demand domestically and under Canadian regulations, we will be creating huge new vulnerabilities via foreign dependencies. Even despite us not training top models domestically, a lot of demand could be served from domestic use of open models in data centers under Canadian domestic control, including running domestically tuned models and agent swarms that demand tonnes of inference. It’s a serious strategic need that requires national strategic planning, talent development, regulation, and funding.