PowerBank Corporation's joint development partner has executed the first lease for a 2MW modular data center in Ontario, the company said in an October 29 announcement. The Toronto-based energy developer plans to lease the powered shell to an AI cloud operator that installs and runs its own GPUs, and calls the pro
Featured: Wide landscape photograph of prefabricated modular data center units with power distribution equipment.ject the first of several sites it intends to develop across Ontario.
PowerBank develops the project with a joint development partner under a joint development agreement, and the two share the lease revenue. The 30-year site lease is the first AI infrastructure project under the strategic partnership, according to the release. The tenant role is still open. PowerBank has not signed an agreement for the project's capacity and says it is in discussions with several potential tenants.
The facility is designed for about 1.77MW of leasable IT capacity, which PowerBank says could hold roughly 500 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs across 11 racks with about 220TB of aggregate GPU memory. Data Center Dynamics reported that PowerBank did not name the partner, the tenant, the location, or the existing energy asset the data center will connect to.
Capital cost, including land, the modular shell, electrical systems, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, and fiber, is estimated at about C$10 million (US$7.16 million), to be funded by PowerBank and its partner. GPUs, servers, and computing equipment are excluded from that figure and are expected to be bought by the tenant. If a tenant is secured on the company's assumed terms, the project could generate about C$2 million (US$1.43 million) in annual lease revenue, shared between PowerBank and its partner, w.media reported.
The project needs a zoning by-law amendment and a building permit from the local municipality, and the parties are coordinating a pre-consultation meeting to confirm the requirements. Construction is expected to take 8 to 12 months after approvals, with commercial operation anticipated in PowerBank's fiscal 2028, which ends June 30, 2028.
The plan follows earlier data center work by PowerBank in the province. PowerBank signed a joint development agreement with US modular data center firm Nodiac earlier in 2026 to deploy 20MW of modular units at distribution-level interconnection points on sites where PowerBank holds generation capacity, land, and permits, according to Data Center Dynamics.
"Compute is following power, and the companies that already have power in the ground are the ones that will win the next phase of AI," said Dr. Richard Lu, chief executive of PowerBank.
Baxtel tracks 141 data centers in Ontario, operated by 74 providers, with 105 of them in the Toronto metro.
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