$10-billion Cape Breton AI data centre and wind farm build-out announced by EverWind

A $10-billion data centre and green energy development was announced Friday for Point Tupper.

The project, for which the first phase of construction has already begun, would be the largest private investment in Nova Scotia’s history.

Phase 1, targeted to be operational in late 2027, will be a 95-megawatt data centre in a 200,000-square-foot warehouse at EverWind Fuel’s Point Tupper site.

Phase 2, targeted to be operational by mid-2028, will also be built on the site and bring capacity to 325 megawatts.

Full capacity of the planned campus will be 420 megawatts.

Powering the data centres will be 650 megawatts of wind power, composed of 80 turbines across northeastern Nova Scotia that will be 51 per cent owned by a Mi’kmaq consortium led by Membertou First Nation. Environmental assessments have already been granted for those projects and construction is underway on some of them.

The project includes a 200-megawatt battery storage bank.

According to a technical briefing by EverWind staff, the project will meet or exceed federal and provincial guidelines for data centre development. That commitment includes the facility not adding any costs to electricity ratepayers.

The project is estimated to create 2,000 jobs throughout construction and 215 full-time positions once operational, between the data centre and the wind farms.

The data centre will have water supplied by Landrie Lake. EverWind already has the necessary permitting to take water.

The data centre will operate on a closed-loop cooling system, which will require an average of 100,000 litres per day in Phase 1 and 500,000 litres per day at full operation.

The total existing usage for the Point Tupper Industrial Park is 6.5 million litres per day. According to EverWind, the data centre usage will be about one per cent of the daily safe yield of 34 million litres from Landrie Lake.

A news release from an AI developer, which has already contracted for 100 per cent of the Phase 1 capacity of the data centre, was expected late Friday.

More to come.