MONTREAL — This week I was going to tell you about Enovum, a Montreal-based data-centre company that has seen its business explode because of the artificial intelligence firms who use its services. In short, AI requires a bonkers amount of computing power and, for a variety of reasons, many in the field are loath to relegate their intellectual property to the cloud.
I toured Enovum’s facilities, which are huge, humming and meat-locker cold. I read a bunch of stuff about data centres and cloud computing. I scheduled interviews, one of which was with Pierre-Luc Quimper, Enovum’s founder. Last week, I got a call from Enovum partner Bahador Zabihiyan, who is also Quimper’s close friend. Quimper had died at his condo in Florida. The cause of his death had not been determined as of this writing, but there were no signs of violence. He was 39.
It was gutting to hear. I met Quimper in 2018 while working on a story about Bitfarms, one of the province’s first Bitcoin mining operations. At the time, Bitcoin was in the midst of an early hype cycle, with a corresponding spike in value, and early adopters were suddenly emerging from their overheated basements as millionaires.
Pierre-Luc was a perfect case study: a scruffy elementary school dropout from New Brunswick who mined Bitcoin to pay his mortgage, nearly burning down his house in the process. I met him for a tour of Bitfarm’s facilities in the exurbs of Montreal. He wore his usual uniform: ill-fitting jeans and a too-big Bitfarms-branded golf shirt. Naturally, he had a brand new Lamborghini, and our speedy dance through traffic to Montreal from Saint-Hyacinthe made it into my copy. “He was a PR nightmare,” Zabihiyan said to me last week.
His business mind, though, was something else. Mining Bitcoin—using computers to solve mathematical equations, essentially—is an energy-intensive affair. There are currently about two million bitcoins left to be mined, out of a total of 21 million, and those mathematical equations become progressively more complex with each coin created. Pierre-Luc recognized early on that Quebec, with its plethora of cheap, green power, was an ideal place to service this ever-increasing demand.
Hydro-Québec put on a charm offensive to the crypto-mining industry in 2016, and Bitfarms was among the first to secure energy contracts at rock-bottom rates. It actually helped Bitfarms when the utility changed its tune and imposed a moratorium on new crypto-mining outfits the following year. Suddenly, there were fewer competitors clamouring for real estate in the province.
Pierre-Luc located his Bitcoin mining operations in the cheap, sturdy husks of former industrial buildings in decidedly un-Montreal places like Cowansville, Farnham and Baie-Comeau. In Saint-Hyacinthe, which is known for its chocolate, Bitfarm’s mining facility is in an old cocoa storage plant. To continue Bitfarm’s expansion amid Hydro-Québec’s moratorium, Pierre-Luc struck deals with municipal governments in Sherbrooke and Magog to buy their excess power.
Pierre-Luc left Bitfarms in 2019. The split with the company’s new partners, I’m told, was acrimonious. Regardless, his mind was elsewhere. By then, cloud computing had transitioned from overhyped buzzword to mass adoption, yet Pierre-Luc saw its limitations. AI requires outsized computational power. The cloud was more than happy to oblige, but it was expensive. For the data-hungry among us, and for AI types in particular, the cloud’s chief selling point—cost efficacy—doesn’t always apply. “You can wake up overnight with a big bill on your end, and there is nothing to negotiate with someone from Microsoft,” Harold Dumur, CEO of AI software-development company Ova, recently told me.
Like Bitfarms, Enovum is a brick-and-mortar play in the otherwise ethereal world of computing, with hulking electrical transformers powering the place, and bus-sized diesel generators standing by should the lights go off. Its 70,000 square feet sit in the industrial scrapes of Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, with a planned expansion in the works. Like a Bitcoin mining operation, Enovum’s facility is deceptively banal: rooms full of wires and noise and sheer power encased in buildings that seem built to be ignored.
Fundamentally, Pierre-Luc Quimper’s success lay in his ability to see the future as it bent into the horizon, as well as the inclination to bet on what he saw. I appreciate people like this, and not only because I possess exactly zero of these traits. It makes them innately interesting people—to discover, to write about and to tell you what is likely going to happen with unnerving confidence and, maybe, the stomping of a Lamborghini’s gas pedal. I miss him already.
Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.” @MartinPatriquin
