There is a pattern to where IREN builds in British Columbia, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Canal Flats: a closed lumber mill. Mackenzie: a former lumber town of about 4,000 people. Prince George: the forestry capital of the north.
The company now operates roughly 160 megawatts of data centre capacity across those three sites, making it the largest such operator in the province. It has been built almost entirely on the bones of the old resource economy.
The three sites
Canal Flats came first, online in 2019 on ten acres of freehold land repurposed from a shuttered mill in the Kootenays. It runs at about 30 megawatts, sits 100 kilometres from Cranbrook and roughly 500 kilometres east of Vancouver.
Mackenzie is the largest of the three at 80 megawatts, on eleven acres acquired from the District of Mackenzie itself, some 670 kilometres north of Vancouver. Prince George follows at 50 megawatts on a twelve-acre freehold site.
All three run on roughly 98 per cent direct hydroelectricity, with the small remainder covered by renewable energy certificates. That is not a marketing detail. It is the entire reason the company is in British Columbia.
Why a mill town is close to ideal
A decommissioned mill comes with the two things a data centre needs most and takes longest to obtain: a heavy industrial power connection already built to the site, and a municipality that badly wants an industrial employer.
Mills are enormous electrical loads. When one closes, that grid capacity does not disappear — it sits there, paid for, connected, waiting. A developer who buys the site inherits an interconnection that would otherwise take years of queue and negotiation.
The cold helps too. Cooling is one of the largest operating costs in the business, and northern British Columbia provides free cooling for a large part of the year. Cheap hydro, cold air, existing transmission and available industrial land is a genuinely difficult combination to find anywhere else on the continent.
From bitcoin to AI
These sites were built for cryptocurrency mining, and that origin still shapes the politics around them. In 2022 the province suspended new and early-stage connection requests for crypto mining operations, on the reasoning that BC Hydro capacity should not be consumed by an industry generating very few jobs per megawatt. IREN’s existing 160 megawatts of British Columbia capacity was unaffected by that decision.
Since then the whole sector has pivoted. The northern British Columbia bitcoin mines are being converted into AI data centres, chasing the far higher margins available from GPU compute. The physical requirements overlap heavily — dense racks, serious power, serious cooling — which is why the transition has been so quick.
It is worth keeping the scale honest. IREN’s largest campus is not in Canada at all: Childress, Texas, has reached 750 megawatts operational, more than four times the entire British Columbia footprint. British Columbia is a valuable, clean, well-sited part of the portfolio rather than the centre of it. Our earlier piece on why Canada is investing billions in AI and data centres covers the national picture.
What the towns actually get
This is where local opinion divides, and both sides have a point.
The case in favour is straightforward. These are communities that lost their principal employer and watched their young people leave. A data centre brings a substantial industrial tax base, restores value to a derelict site, and provides a reason for fibre and grid investment that benefits everyone connected to it.
The case against is equally straightforward. A data centre is not a mill. A mill employed hundreds of people directly and supported contractors, truckers and suppliers across the region. A data centre at this scale employs dozens. The tax revenue is real and the payroll is thin, and residents notice that a facility consuming as much electricity as a small city can be run by a staff that fits in a single room.
The water and heat question
Two objections come up at every public meeting about a data centre, and they deserve straight answers.
The first is water. Large data centres in hot climates consume enormous quantities of it through evaporative cooling, which is why the industry has become a live political issue in Arizona and Spain. In northern British Columbia the calculation is different, because ambient air is cold enough for much of the year that closed-loop and air-side cooling do most of the work. The water question is real, but it is far less acute at 54 degrees north than at 33.
The second is waste heat, and here the province is leaving value on the table. A facility rejecting tens of megawatts of low-grade heat sits in a town that heats its buildings all winter. District heating schemes in the Nordic countries have been capturing exactly this for years. Nothing comparable has been required, or seriously incentivised, at any of the three British Columbia sites.
The question that decides the next decade
British Columbia has to decide what its clean power is for. Hydroelectricity is the province’s great inherited advantage, and demand for it is now rising simultaneously from electrified transport, electrified heating, industrial decarbonisation, and this.
Compute is a legitimate use with a real economic case, and doing it on hydro in a cold climate is genuinely better for emissions than doing it on gas in a hot one. But every megawatt has an alternative claim on it, and the province has not yet said clearly how it intends to choose. Until it does, that decision is being made one interconnection agreement at a time, in towns that are in no position to refuse.
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