Hive Digital subsidiary plans 320 megawatt AI data centre near Toronto in $3.5 billion investment
The Canadian digital infrastructure group listed in Toronto and New York, has unveiled plans to build one of Canada's largest artificial intelligence data centres in the Greater Toronto Area through its subsidiary Buzz High Performance Computing.
The facility, which the company describes as an "AI gigafactory", would have approximately 320 megawatts of power capacity and house more than 100,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), the specialised chips used to train and run AI models.
Buzz HPC has acquired a 25-acre site comprising two adjacent parcels for a combined $58 million and says it has secured key milestones along the power pathway needed to bring the project online.
The target date for the facility to begin operating is the second half of 2027, with a total capital investment of approximately 3.5 billion Canadian dollars.
The company said the project would create more than 800 construction jobs and hundreds of permanent skilled positions once operational.
Hive framed the investment in terms of national sovereignty, arguing that Canada needs domestically controlled computing infrastructure to avoid relying on data centres abroad for sensitive workloads.
Executive chairman Frank Holmes said the facility would allow AI applications, including financial platforms, healthcare and scientific research to "run on Canadian iron, under Canadian control".
The site sits in what Hive calls the Toronto-Waterloo innovation corridor, a stretch that includes the University of Toronto, where AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton conducted foundational research, and the University of Waterloo's engineering programmes.
Chief executive Aydin Kilic said the announcement takes Hive's total global power capacity to more than 850 megawatts, comprising 450 megawatts of operating data centres and a pipeline of 400 megawatts expected to come online next year.
In Canada specifically, the company now has 100 megawatts of operating capacity alongside the 320-megawatt Toronto project and a 70-megawatt site at Grand Falls in New Brunswick, giving it land and power to support approximately 130,000 GPUs.
The facility is designed to run on Ontario's electricity grid, which draws heavily on nuclear, hydroelectric and renewable generation, and will use closed-loop cooling systems that avoid water consumption.
Hive was founded in 2017 as one of the first publicly listed cryptocurrency mining companies and has since expanded into AI computing and high-performance data centre services across Canada, Sweden and Paraguay.
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