Site not yet chosen
Canada's Qscale plans to build a multi-billion-dollar data center in Toronto.
The data center operator’s president and co-founder, Martin Bouchard, told The Logic that Qscale has an engagement with an Ontario construction firm and has received a preliminary validation from Canadian utility Hydro One for power.
The site for the facility has not been chosen.
Minimum investment in the project would be between C$2.5 billion (USD$1.8bn) and C$4bn (USD$2.9bn).
Qscale’s expansion is backed by up to $320 million in financing, which it secured from Desjardins Group, Scotiabank, and Export Development Canada in November of last year.
The company was founded in 2018 by Vincent Thibault, Dany Perron, and Martin Bouchard, with the aim of providing infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing. Bouchard previously founded software company Copernic as well as 4Degrés data centers, which was sold to Videotron in 2015 before Vantage bought the facilities in 2019.
Last year, QScale received investment from US operator Aligned Data Centers to help it build out its portfolio. Existing QScale investors include the government of Québec through Investissement Québec, and Desjardins Capital.
Construction started on the company's first campus (known as QScale Q01) in Lévis, Quebec, in 2021, and construction of the second building started in September 2022. The site is expected to have 142MW of IT capacity at full build-out. HPE is a customer at the campus.
The company has previously announced plans for a second facility in the Ecoparc de Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, Montreal.
