This Canadian data centre helps keep the internet running. The tech world wants more like it, fast

There are no bollards, fences or barbed wire protecting the TR2 data centre, near the foot of Toronto’s Parliament Street. Its location isn’t a closely guarded secret, but the unassuming exterior hides a fortress-like web of critical technology humming inside.

At any given time, this squat, five-floor structure – perched on less than a quarter of a small city block – is consuming roughly 0.5 per cent of all the power being used by the City of Toronto.

TR2, which opened in 2016, is one of more than 260 data centres owned by Equinix Inc., a California-based digital infrastructure company that could be “the largest tech company you’ve never heard of,” says Sanjeevan Srikrishnan, its director of global solutions architecture and engineering.

Data centres like this one are the beating heart of the digital services that permeate our lives: web traffic, cloud computing, data storage and financial markets transactions. In fact, they’re now considered critical infrastructure, similar to hospitals, given the breadth of core systems that connect to them.

TR2 is an “edge” facility that runs everyday tasks for about 60 corporate carriers – think major telecom providers and the largest U.S. tech giants. (The Globe and Mail is not identifying any clients for security reasons.) Nearly half of global cloud on-ramps – private services that give access to the cloud – flow through Equinix. And security is tight: Our every move is shadowed by the building’s head of security, who warns that if we veer off course, we’ll be tackled.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have set off a race to build more – and more sophisticated – data centres, many of them financed by Canadian pension funds and global sovereign wealth funds. That means building more renewable energy infrastructure to run them on, too, since a Goldman Sachs report published last June estimated that ChatGPT queries consume 10 times more power than ordinary Google searches.

Equinix is increasingly building more advanced hyperscale data centres that can perform the most demanding tasks, such as training new AI models. Its primary objective: giving telecom and tech companies access to secure, temperature-controlled, adaptable vaults with zero risk of service interruptions.

“We are a giant, very reliable refrigerator” with lots of connectivity and security, says Mr. Srikrishnan. “A Swiss Army knife wrapped in a shopping mall.”

Most importantly, he says: “We don’t go down.”

With the power needed to run digital applications increasing exponentially, Equinix is building a 250-megawatt campus south of Atlanta that will be many times more powerful than its Toronto facilities.

In 2019, when most users were just checking e-mails and watching YouTube, a single server rack might draw 2.5 kilovolt-amperes (kVA) – one one-thousandth of a megawatt. But when COVID-19 sent everyone home and onto endless video calls, demand per rack jumped to 4 kVA in 2020, then to 8 kVA in 2021, says Mr. Srikrishnan. That edged up to 10 kVA in 2022. When AI chatbots went mainstream, demand from the most sophisticated servers surged to 40 kVA in 2023, then 150 kVA last year.

With fans consuming about 40 per cent of the electricity running to the servers, Equinix is now switching to a new, more efficient liquid cooling system. “Think about how much you use digital today versus back when you did in 2019,” says Mr. Srikrishnan. “It’s a remarkable difference.”