The questions and answers below have been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Bray: Have you actually scanned all of Canada to determine where the best locations are?
John Watson: What is clear is that this story begins with leadership and Saskatchewan. We have truly benefited from Prime Minister Mo’s outstanding leadership. That spilled over to his team and how they worked together and how they worked with us was extraordinary. I don’t want to put a standard in front of you and tell other people that we’re not great as a state, but we certainly have the talent of our people as leaders, but they’re at the top of the shelf because we know that building economic value, building jobs, building investment, and good things will come to residents who have that mindset.
What are the economic benefits?We are asking how much it will cost to build the center. We’re hearing what financial benefits the spinoff will bring to the state. Can you explain how that translates into hard dollars?
Watson: If you think about it, bringing $12 billion into the state means an incredible amount of tax money on that initial. I think this is well documented, the number of jobs over a sustained period of time. 800 direct jobs and all secondary jobs. We will see people coming to the city to live, stay, work and build in the region. Many people end up staying because they find it a great place to live and have a really good quality of life. We think there’s a lot of opportunity because we’ve set the table. To some extent, from a technical and technological investment standpoint, Regina is at the top of the country, and someone sets the table, brings in a big project, brings in a lot of good people, and others tend to follow. Its roadmap is fairly consistent around the world. I think there’s a really positive growth spin-off here. It will have a positive impact on the future and the trends in the industry will be very positive.
Can you talk about the role that SaskTel plays in this? From my understanding, they play a critical role in the success of this project.
Watson: If 100 companies come to build a data center, 99 of them will only want to build the data center. Over the past three years, we have invested approximately $1.5 billion to build three startups. Its only purpose is how to support the government. How can we help companies leverage AI within their organizations? We’ve created thousands of technology jobs. The three companies are Bell Cyber, Ateko, and Bell AI Fabric. So our objective is not to build data centres, but to build a Canadian high-tech services organization that can enable AI for businesses and governments. We’re doing that and there’s a lot of investment. We brought in eight startups from across the country, from Halifax to British Columbia. We look forward to working with SaskTel to leverage the capabilities we have built and invested in to ensure we can partner with them and them to benefit our broad customer base across the province.
This is more than just a data center, it’s a way to leverage AI to drive productivity, jobs, and innovation in the state. That was a really important factor for Prime Minister Moe. This didn’t happen overnight. We have invested three years in developing these features.
People worry about heat generation, they worry about power consumption, but will it affect their electricity bill? They worry about noise. Can you talk about some of the mitigation measures you’ve taken?
Watson: We made that clear. Water is not used for anything other than the toilet and sink. This will be a modest amount. It’s called technical water. Regardless of the initial load, it is not extracted from any source as it is incompatible with the mineral content. That’s included too. There are areas in the southern United States that use evaporators, which require huge amounts of water. You don’t need anything. It certainly benefits from the climate. The other thing is, in the case of air-cooled data centers, they used to have these huge fans that were used to cool these data centers from 7 a.m. to 24 a.m. because they didn’t like the noise. Due to the nature of the High Performance AI Center, air cooling will not work. Therefore, it has a chiller that supplies cooling water to the GPUs, chips, and data racks, so there is no air impact like in traditional data centers. We use natural gas, and natural gas is much cleaner. There’s great utility in the states that we work with, and we think it’s a really good alternative on that front. So when you cover them, you know that they are all well-maintained. There will be significant setbacks, so we plan to plant trees on the property. Heat is also important. They generate a lot of heat, but there are benefits here. It is located at a suitable distance to support a large number of people using a system called a district heating system. We can bring heat back to universities, community colleges, George Gordon First Nation, and the amount of heat generated can heat very large developments and structures. If this facility is operated on a large scale, most of these facilities can be heated.
