AI and compute economics
2026-04-25
10 min read
8 sources
Quebec hydropower and the new gating of AI compute
Quebec spent two decades selling itself as the cheapest, greenest place on the continent to plug in a data center. In 2026 Hydro-Quebec is throttling new connections, redesigning industrial tariffs, and forcing hyperscalers to rethink where the next gigawatt of AI training capacity actually lands.
Quebec sits on roughly 37 gigawatts of installed hydro capacity, historically the cheapest large-scale clean power in North America. From 2018 the province first banned new bitcoin mining connections, then welcomed AI campuses, and by 2024 began throttling all new large industrial loads above 5 megawatts. Hydro-Quebec's 2035 strategic pla...