Manitoba Data Center Market

Market Overview

Manitoba is a small data centre market centred on Winnipeg. Most capacity sits in downtown colocation rooms, a few enterprise data centres and one purpose-built Tier III facility. Manitoba Hydro supplies almost all of the province's power from hydroelectric generation, and its industrial rates rank among the lowest in North America. Provincial policy, more than land or fibre, now sets the pace of new development.

Colocation and Interconnection

• The Grain Exchange Building at 167 Lombard Avenue is Winnipeg's main carrier hotel. Its telecom tenants include Bell, Shaw, TELUS, Zayo and WiBand.
• XGSC's Global Server Centre in the Grain Exchange Building hosts the primary node of the Manitoba Internet Exchange (MBIX).
• MBIX also peers at Les.net's YWG2 (294 Portage Avenue) and YWG4 (355 Portage Avenue) suites and at Manitoba Hydro Telecom's data centre atop Manitoba Hydro Place.
• Equinix WI1 on Waverley Street is the province's largest commercial colocation facility. MTS opened it in 2015 as Manitoba's first Tier III commercial data centre, and Equinix acquired it from Bell in 2020.
• Valley Fiber's True North Data Center Exchange in Winkler offers a Tier 3-design facility outside the Red River floodway.

AI and High-Performance Computing

• Bell Canada is converting the former Merit Functional Foods plant in CentrePort Canada, in the RM of Rosser. The building will become an AI data centre for its Bell AI Fabric network.
• BUZZ HPC, the AI cloud arm of HIVE Digital Technologies, brought an NVIDIA B200 GPU cluster online at Bell AI Fabric in Manitoba in May 2026.
• Cerebras Systems has contracted AI compute capacity from Bell in Manitoba.
• In June 2026, Premier Wab Kinew said the province would not support the proposed hyperscale data centre campus near Île-des-Chênes, south of Winnipeg.

Cryptocurrency Mining

• About 40 crypto mines operate in Manitoba, all on electrical service secured before November 2022.
• The province paused new crypto connections in November 2022. Since September 2025, regulation bars Manitoba Hydro from serving any new crypto request.

Power and Policy

• Since September 2025, any request for more than 5 MW goes through two steps. Manitoba Hydro first decides whether supply is feasible. The Minister of Finance then rates the project low, medium or high priority.
• Manitoba Hydro serves requests in priority order, and decisions cannot be appealed. The rating weighs grid impact, jobs and investment, sovereign AI computing, emissions, and Indigenous and rural benefits.
• In June 2026 the legislature passed Bill 39. It creates separate rate classes for data centres and crypto miners. It also allows a levy of up to 100% of the bill on loads above 5 MW. It had not been proclaimed as of October 2026.
• Manitoba Hydro's 2025 Integrated Resource Plan projects a firm capacity shortfall of up to 600 MW by the end of 2030. The plan adds 1,760 MW over ten years, including 750 MW of combustion turbines at Brandon and 600 MW of wind.