MONTREAL — In Quebec, cryptocurrency mining might be AI’s latest casualty.

Quebec-founded, Toronto-based, New York-bound Bitfarms is in the process of converting its 13 mining sites in North and South America into AI and high-performance computing data centres—including its eight Quebec facilities, Bitfarms spokesperson Tara Goldstein told me.

This is pretty huge. Bitfarms began mining in 2017, making it both pioneer and proselytizer, with its data centres in Quebec and beyond acting as giant, humming advertisements for crypto’s value and legitimacy. In diverting its 170 megawatts of allotted power in the province away from crypto and towards AI, Bitfarms is signaling its belief that its future lies more in large language models than blockchain. 

It also poses a conundrum for Hydro-Québec. The public utility has long cast a beady eye at crypto mining, saying the harvesting of bitcoin and the like is a highly automated, energy-intensive affair that creates few jobs, is often shrouded in secrecy and is especially prone to bubbles. In short, a bit too cowboy for a staid, government-owned monopoly, which ceased issuing permits for new crypto mining operations in 2018, and instituted a formal moratorium in 2023.

But here’s the thing: You could make a near-identical argument against AI data centres.

Consider job creation, a frequent theme when Hydro-Québec talks about infrastructure investment. Data centres, both AI and not, are often seen as employment mana for the often far-flung, job-starved regions where they settle, with tales of $200,000-plus jobs and a near-infinite pool of overtime hours.

Yet the vast majority of these are construction jobs that disappear by the time the concrete dries. Once up and running, AI data centres mostly hum along on their own. A recent analysis from Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Food and Water Watch suggests the U.S. data centre industry employs all of 23,000 people permanently. For this, you can blame the scale-up: the bigger they are, the fewer employees per megawatt AI data centres need. And when it comes to new AI data centres, Big AI tends toward the mastodon-sized.

Big AI also likes secrecy. One of Hydro Québec’s knocks against crypto mining has long been the shadowy nature of the technology. Again, fair enough. Crypto was indeed born of a libertarian desire to bypass central control. Yet many of the companies behind world-bending AI sites are equally discrete. 

Those 728 acres near Fort Wayne, Indiana destined for an AI data centre? They were purchased by an anonymous front company under the auspices of something called “Project Zodiac”—which turned out to be Google. There’s also “Project Cumulus” and “Balloonist, LLC” (Hello, Meta!), both equally anonymous purchases of a cumulative 760 acres. Will Hydro-Québec hand over precious megawatts to similarly secretive operations, if or when they come knocking?

So far, the answer looks to be a qualified yes. A decade ago, Hydro-Québec put on a charm offensive to attract data centres to the province, promising cheap power and bountiful acreage to prospective suitors. By 2022, it had turned cold on the idea, probably because it wanted to attract the EV battery sector instead.

Last week, the utility split the difference by doubling the electricity rates for large data centres in Quebec, to 13 cents per kilowatt hour, subject to regulatory approval. This would put the province somewhere in the middle of the North American pack, as far as electricity rates are concerned—more than North Dakota’s 7.44 U.S. cents per kilowatt hour, but far less than California’s 29.46 U.S. cents. 

Still, in hiking its rates, Hydro-Québec seems to believe Big AI will be willing to foot the bill. The utility expects data centre energy demand in the province to grow sevenfold by 2035. In 2018, faced with similar demand, Hydro-Québec slammed the door on the crypto mining boom. In 2026, the door remains open to Big AI—but the price of entry just went up.

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 panellist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”