North American energy company PowerBank and its joint development partner have started work on a 2MW modular data centre in Ontario, Canada under a joint development agreement.
The scheme is the first in a planned series of facilities across the province. Once permitted, constructed and tenanted as a powered shell, the site could generate approximately C$2m ($1.4m) in gross annual lease revenue, to be shared between the partners.
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Capital expenditure for the facility is estimated at C$10m, funded jointly to cover the land, modular building shell, electrical infrastructure, fibre connectivity, and direct-to-chip liquid cooling.
Hardware costs are excluded, as the future tenant will install its own servers and processors.
Based on current-generation Nvidia GB300 NVL72 architectures, the planned 1.77MW of IT capacity could support roughly 500 graphics processing units (GPU) across 11 racks, offering 220TB of aggregate memory.
PowerBank CEO Dr Richard Lu said: “Compute is following power, and the companies that already have power in the ground are the ones that will win the next phase of AI.
“This first lease shows our model at work: an energy site we have already developed now positioned to earn a second revenue stream from AI infrastructure.
“As inference moves closer to the people and businesses who use it, North America will need many smaller data centres built in months, not a handful of giant campuses built over years. PowerBank’s portfolio is positioned for exactly that shift, and we expect this to be the first of many sites we advance with our partner.”
PowerBank is currently in discussions with several prospective clients, though a tenant agreement has not yet been executed.
The project remains subject to local planning approvals, including a building permit and a zoning by-law amendment, for which pre-consultation meetings are being arranged.
Following necessary clearances, construction is scheduled to take eight to 12 months, targeting commercial launch during the company’s 2028 fiscal year ending 30 June 2028.
The development targets growing demand for AI inference, which McKinsey & Company projects will account for approximately 60% of AI compute demand by 2030, increasing at an annual rate of around 36%.
While primary North American data centre markets experienced a 1.4% vacancy rate in the first half of 2026, colocation vacancy across Toronto stood at around 7.2% in mid-2026.
PowerBank develops, owns and operates solar generation and battery storage facilities, with an active development pipeline of nearly 1GW and more than 100MW of completed power generation projects.
