One data centre or one million homes? Mapping Ontario’s proposed hyperscaler boom.
One of the fastest-growing municipalities in Canada, the town of Milton is being eyed for something beyond housing development: two proposed data centres that together would require a city’s worth of electricity, the equivalent of a million homes.
Because data centres don’t need to go through a provincial consultation process, there is no one place to see what projects could be coming down the pipe. Unlike in Alberta, Ontario’s energy regulator, the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), does not publish the locations of data centres vying for electricity. When asked, it refused to provide a comprehensive list of projects, citing “commercial sensitivities.”
