Rising demand in North America’s data centre market is spurring ultra-low vacancy rates despite active construction across the content.
CBRE’s semiannual North American Data Center Trends Report highlights one Canadian market: Alberta.
“Alberta is attracting the world’s largest hyper-scalers due to its abundant energy, low-cost land, and a power market that allows operators to control their own supply,” the report reads.
“The province operates Canada’s only deregulated electricity market, enabling developers to either contract power directly or construct their own on-site generation facilities,” according to the report.
In March, experts outlined why Alberta is a contender in the race to build AI infrastructure.
Alberta’s data centre strategy has already attracted nearly $200 billion in potential private investment.
Natural gas is “both plentiful and inexpensive” in Alberta, CBRE notes, “fuelling major projects that operate on dedicated gas-fired plants” such as Meta’s $13 billion data centre north of Edmonton and Amazon’s $4.3B campus near Calgary.
Additionally, the report observes, Alberta’s corporate tax rate of 8% is the lowest in Canada.
“While large facilities face a new data centre levy of up to 2%,” CBRE acknowledges, “operators who supply their own power—a common design among significant projects underway in the region—will be taxed at a reduced rate.”
Data centres are now considered “critical infrastructure” according to the government of Canada, which established Canada’s Responsible Data Centre Development Principles.
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