Murray Wood: Government nickel and dimes us in advance of Saskatchewan budget
We know the budget is going to include a deficit, and Murray Wood says it's probably not a good sign that the government...
The provincial government is partnering with Bell Canada on a 300 megawatt data centre project outside of Regina.
Construction on the facility in the RM of Sherwood is expected to start this spring, with the first stage running by 2027. President of Bell Business Market, John Watson, joined The Evan Bray Show on Wednesday to discuss why Saskatchewan was chosen and what the project means for Canada.
Read more:
- George Gordon First Nation excited for Bell Canada partnership on AI data centre
- Bell Canada, Saskatchewan government partner on data centre project outside Regina
- B.C. says AI and data centre projects must compete for power in new selection process
Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:
The following questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
EVAN BRAY: Did you actually do a scan across Canada to determine where the best locations might be?
JOHN WATSON: I can tell you, unequivocally, this story starts with leadership and the province of Saskatchewan. You really benefit from exceptional leadership with Premier Moe and, I can tell you, the cascade of that to his team and how they work together and how they worked with us, it was exceptional. I don’t want to put a benchmark in front of you and tell anyone else they’re not great as a province, but certainly the caliber of folks in leadership, but building economic value, building jobs, building investment, and knowing that good things come to the citizens with that mindset, they’re there at the top of the shelf.
What are the economic benefits? We’re hearing about what the cost to build the center is. We’re hearing what the spin off financial benefits to the province would be. Can you lay out what those look like in hard dollars?
WATSON: If you think, right up front, bringing $12 billion into the province – there’s incredible taxes that come with that initial. I think this has been well documented, the number of jobs for a sustained period of time. 800 direct jobs plus all the secondary ones. We’ll see folks living, staying, coming to the province, coming into the city to work and build. Many will end up staying afterwards because they find it’s a great place to live and a really good quality of life. We see a lot of opportunity because we set the table and, to a certain degree, from a technical and technology investment perspective, Regina is at the top within the country, and it tends to be one where someone sets the table, brings in a big project, a lot of good folks and you have others following. That roadmap is pretty consistent across the world. I think there’s a secondary effect here of growth that’s really positive. It’s going to bring goodness around the future and industry trends that are quite positive.
Can you talk about the role SaskTel plays in this? My understanding is they play an important role in the success of this project
WATSON: If you had 100 companies coming to build a data center, 99 of them would want to just build a data center. Over the last three years, we’ve invested about a billion and a half dollars in building a company, three startups, that their sole purpose is, how do we help the government? How do we help businesses bring AI to life within their organizations? We’ve created thousands of technical jobs. The three companies are Bell Cyber, Ateko and Bell AI Fabric. So our intent isn’t to build a data center, our intent is to build a Canadian high tech Services organization that can bring AI to life for businesses and government. We’re doing that and the investments have been significant. We brought eight startups from across the country, from Halifax to to BC, and we’ll work with SaskTel to leverage those capabilities that we’ve built, that we’ve invested in and allow them and partner with them to benefit their broad customer base within the province.
It’s more than a data center, it’s how we enable AI to drive productivity, jobs, and innovation within the province. That was a key component of it that really mattered to Premier Moe. This didn’t happen overnight, we’ve been investing for three years in creating those capabilities.
People worry about heat generation, they worry about the amount of power and will this affect my power bill? They worry about the noise. Can you talk about some of the mitigation you’ve done?
WATSON: We’ve made it really clear: we’ll use zero water other than toilets and sinks, which is going to be modest. It’s called technical water. It won’t be pulled from any source because it doesn’t fit with the mineral contents regardless of the first load. It’s also contained. There are areas in the southern US that use evaporators and they require an enormous amount of water. We don’t require any. It’s a beneficiary of the climate, for sure. The other thing is, with air cooled data centers, that’s where folks didn’t like the noise in the past, so seven by 24, you’d have these massive fans used to cool these data centers. The nature of a high performance AI center, air cooling doesn’t work, so we have chillers that deliver cooled water to the GPUs or the chips and the data racks, so you don’t have that air effect that the traditional data centers would have. We will use natural gas and natural gas is a lot cleaner. There’s terrific utility in the province that we’re working with and we see that as a really good alternative on that side. So in covering those off, we see all of those being managed well. There’s going to be significant setbacks and we will plant trees on the property. The one thing about heat which is important, as well. It does generate a lot of heat, but here’s the benefit – we’re within a reasonable distance to support a number of folks with they’re called district heating systems. We can bring heat back to the university, the Community College, the George Gordon First Nation and the amount of heat produced allows them to heat very large developments or structures. When this facility is running at scale we can heat most of those properties.
