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Canadian renewable firm PowerBank has announced plans to develop a 2MW modular data center in Ontario, Canada. According to the company, it will build the data center with a joint development partner, with which it has signed the first lease for the project. The company plans to lease the powered shell to an AI cloud operator, which would install and run its own GPUs. PowerBank said the site could generate around CA$2 million (US$1.4 million) a year in lease revenue, split with its partner, if a tenant is secured on its assumed terms and the project is permitted, financed, built, and operational. The site is the first of several PowerBank plans to develop in Ontario. The company did not name the partner, the tenant, the location, or the existing energy asset the data center will connect to. It also gave no construction cost, timeline, or power source. DCD has reached out for further information. The company said that the strategy is based on the increasing move to inference workloads across the sector. “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,” said Richard Lu, CEO of PowerBank. “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 centers 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.” In July, the company signed a joint development agreement (JDA) with US modular data center firm Nodiac to deploy 20MW modular data center units at distribution-level interconnection points on sites where PowerBank already holds generation capacity, land, and permits. The companies claim that the model is designed to bring compute online in months rather than the years required by large-load transmission-queue interconnection. PowerBank is based in Toronto, Canada, and claims to have a development pipeline exceeding 1GW of capacity, with more than 100MW of operational solar and battery capacity.
document fetched 2026-10-31 02:54 · canonical https://datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/powerbank-plans-2mw-modular-data-center-in-ontario-canada