According to the market research, the Canadian data centre market is expected to more than double by 2030. As growth accelerates in 2026 and beyond, operators must accommodate expanding workloads, evolving regulatory requirements, sustainability targets, and rising customer expectations. With demand reaching new highs and oversight intensifying, they face the ongoing challenge of balancing operational efficiency with long‑term financial goals.
As the year begins, we will explore what is working, what remains unresolved, and data centre trends that will shape the industry in 2026.
Trend #1: Significant AI-related infrastructure growth and solutions
AI continues to be the primary driver of new data centre investment. In fact, Citigroup estimates that AI-related infrastructure spend will reach $490 billion by the end of 2026. As GPUs become more optimized within servers and rely on fast networks and storage to perform thousands of calculations in parallel, they will also demand more than traditional servers. As a result, data centre operators are being pushed to provide higher-density power and more advanced cooling solutions to keep up with AI workloads. The demand for GPUs will continue to expand across sectors such as finance, government, and automotive.
Impact: The emergence of mega campuses
The concept of scale has evolved in 2026, with mega data centre campuses continuing to emerge. Rather than operating as single facilities, mega campuses act more like digital cities, often featuring 8 to 12 data halls built across multiple phases and adding 50 to 100 MW of capacity. These campuses increasingly include high-voltage substations and renewable microgrids to reduce already constrained electrical grids. Designed to support high-performance computing, AI training models, and clouds, these multi-building campuses are expected to continue expanding throughout the year. According to datacenters.com, a single training deployment consumes more electricity than a small city. By aggregating demand at scale, mega campuses allow operators to manage energy use more strategically.
Impact: Advanced Cooling Solutions
As GPU demand outpaces the capabilities of traditional cooling methods, the industry is seeing two primary cooling solutions roll out this year: liquid-to-chip cooling and rear-door chillers. Liquid-to-chip cooling delivers liquid directly to the server’s hottest components, such GPU chips, allowing data centres to operate more efficiently while supporting higher power densities. Rear-door chillers are mounted on the back of server racks and remove heat before it enters the data centre room, capturing heat at the source rather than overcooling the entire space.
Beyond sustainability practices, these approaches can help lower operational costs, making them well suited for intense workloads. According to Data Centre Magazine cooling accounts for up to 30 per cent of a data centre’s total energy use. Global cooling energy consumption is forecasted to rise from 136 TWh to 257 TWh by 2028, with costs expected to increase from $19 billion to $36 billion. As cooling demands continue to rise, efficiency gains will play a critical role in managing both energy use and long-term operating costs.
Trend #2: Sustainability Takes Center Stage with a Strong Shift Toward Renewable Energy
Data centres continue to shift toward renewable energy sources as part of a broader, sustainability‑driven operating model. Many operators incorporate on‑site solar generation—often paired with battery storage—to help offset daytime loads, particularly in regions with strong solar availability. Meanwhile, in windy regions, data centre companies are buying electricity produced by wind farms through Power Purchase Agreements.
However, renewable energy sourcing represents only one aspect of how sustainability is evaluated across the industry. Investors, customers, and regulators are placing greater emphasis on measurable sustainability performance, driving the adoption of standardized metrics that extend beyond energy procurement. As a result, sustainability performance is increasingly assessed using three key metrics:
- Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), which measures the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced per unit of IT energy consumed within a data centre and helps quantify decarbonization progress.
- Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which quantifies how efficient data centres use water, expressed as cubic metres of water per megawatt hour of energy (m3/MWh).
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a standardized method used to measure environmental impact across the entire lifecycle, from raw material extraction to manufacturing, transportation, and deployment. Data from these metrics are increasingly being used to inform how data centres are designed to reduce carbon, water, and energy use.
Impact: Grid-Scale Energy Storage Gains Momentum in Ontario
Energy storage is emerging as a critical component for supporting data centre growth while reducing strain on provincial power grids. Large-scale battery systems are increasingly being deployed and evaluated to store excess energy and provide reliable support during peak demand periods. These systems can help stabilize power supply, improve grid resilience, and support greater integration of renewable energy sources.
At the same time, ensuring reliable, always-on power supply remains a top priority as electricity demand accelerates. Natural gas has emerged as one transitional option to help power data centres, supporting rising energy demands while helping reduce downtime risk. According to Enbridge, long-term demand for natural gas is expected to grow strongly through 2040, driven in part by data centre expansion. As demand continues to rise, energy storage is expected to play a growing role in how data centres manage power availability and grid reliability.
Impact: Digital twin technology
As sustainability measurement becomes more data-driven, operators are increasingly turning to advanced modelling tools to better understand and optimize how energy is used across their facilities.
Digital twin technology is gaining traction across the data centre industry, as well as in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing and construction. Digital twins are virtual, real-time replicas of physical environments that allow operators to simulate energy flows, monitor performance, and optimize systems such as cooling and power distribution. By supporting more precise monitoring of energy, cooling, and resource consumption, these tools help data centres better anticipate changes, test scenarios, and understand how operational decisions impact overall performance and efficiency.
Impact: Interest Grows in Low-Carbon Alternative Energy Sources
Looking further ahead, sustainability considerations are also shaping long‑term energy planning. Data centre operators and energy developers are increasingly exploring low-carbon alternatives to support long-term growth and rising power demands. Naturally occurring hydrogen has gained attention as a potential energy source due to its lower emission profile compared to traditional hydrogen production methods. When used, this form of hydrogen produces water vapour rather than carbon emissions into the air.
While still in the early stages, continued exploration and innovation could influence future energy strategies for data centres over the longer term. In parallel, operators are increasingly focused on hybrid energy models that combine renewable sources, such as wind and solar, with microgrids and battery storage to improve resilience, flexibility and sustainability performance.
Trend #3: Cyber Threats Continue to Be Stronger and More Frequent
As data centre infrastructure scales in size and complexity, operational resilience and security are becoming just as critical as energy and sustainability considerations.
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s National Cyber Threat Assessment identifies trends so that Canadian organizations can prepare for and defend against emerging threats. Ransomware remains the top cybercrime threat facing Canada’s critical infrastructure, disrupting organizations’ ability to deliver essential services.
As attacks increasingly operate at machine speed, organizations must be able to respond just as quickly. This is driving greater adoption of pre-emptive cybersecurity, which uses advanced AI-driven techniques to anticipate and neutralize cyberattacks before they occur. Rather than traditional detect-and-respond approaches, pre-emptive cybersecurity focuses on disrupting attacks before they can cause widespread damage.
Impact: Proactive Cybersecurity and Resilient Data Centre Design Become Essential
As cyber threats grow more frequent, sophisticated and automated, data centre cybersecurity is moving beyond reactive defense to a proactive, resilience‑first model. Traditional detect‑and‑respond approaches are no longer adequate in an environment where ransomware, supply‑chain attacks and AI‑enabled threats can disrupt critical digital infrastructure in real time.
In response, operators are accelerating adoption of pre‑emptive, AI‑driven cybersecurity controls, including continuous threat monitoring, behavioural analytics and automated response capabilities. These technologies allow data centres to identify malicious activity earlier and reduce the operational impact of cyber incidents—an increasingly important requirement for cloud, AI and mission‑critical workloads.
At the infrastructure level, stronger and more frequent attacks are reinforcing the importance of cyber resilience by design. Modern data centres are being engineered with network segmentation, redundancy, immutable backups and rapid recovery capabilities, ensuring services remain available even when security events occur.
As a result, cybersecurity is now a central factor in infrastructure strategy and provider selection. Enterprises are prioritizing secure‑by‑design data centre environments that integrate physical security, cyber controls and operational best practices—positioning security as a foundational enabler of trust, availability and long‑term digital growth.
Trend #4: Infrastructure Control and Sovereignty Become Strategic Priorities
Regulatory requirements, rising geopolitical uncertainty and the rapid growth of AI‑driven workloads are pushing organizations to pay closer attention to where their data and infrastructure are hosted and the governance frameworks that apply to them.
As data residency expectations tighten and AI workloads become more critical to business operations, organizations are prioritizing sovereign infrastructure, localized compute and greater transparency over infrastructure governance. This shift reflects a broader move away from one‑size‑fits‑all deployment models toward infrastructure strategies that emphasize control, compliance and operational resilience.
Impact: Geopatriation Emerges. Edge Computing Accelerates. Site Diversification Increases.
Geopatriation refers to the relocation of global hyperscale cloud workloads into local environments to reduce geopolitical risk and strengthen control over data and infrastructure. As data sovereignty expectations increase, organizations are placing greater emphasis on jurisdictional control, compliance alignment and infrastructure governance.
In Canada, this trend is also reflected in efforts to strengthen sovereign digital infrastructure, including the development of domestic AI compute capabilities. The new “Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy” to deploy $2 billion toward AI computing power and includes three models for data hosting: secure for government use, publicly available infrastructure and hybrid hosting model.
At the same time, the rapid growth of AI and other latency-sensitive applications is accelerating demand for localized compute. Rather than relying solely on centralized cloud regions, workloads are increasingly being distributed across sovereign cloud environments, metro hubs and edge locations to balance governance, resilience and performance requirements.
In response, operators are increasingly diversifying their geographic footprints to alleviate power grid congestion and leverage local renewable energy sources.
At Telehouse Canada, staying ahead of data centre and colocation trends means understanding their broader impact on communities, businesses, and the environment. While technologies and demands continue to evolve, our focus remains unchanged. We remain committed to delivering dependable, future-ready data centre infrastructure that empowers organizations to innovate and grow. As demand continues to rise, the decisions made today will play a critical role in shaping Canada’s digital ecosystem in the years ahead.