Our New Data Center — Next to a Dam. Built for Compute.

Isn't it a beauty!?

Say hello to the Beauharnois Generating Station, a run-of-the-river hydro plant on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal, Canada.

Our newest data center region sits just 800 metres from this powerhouse, making it a perfect addition to our carbon-aware cloud, which always selects the lowest CO₂ regions.

With 36 turbines and over 1,900 MW of capacity, Beauharnois can power nearly 400,000 homes, or run ~24,736,362 jobs in parallel, reducing emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional compute. Each 300-tonne rotor weighs as much as 50 African elephants.

If we maxed out the entire output for an hour, we could run ~24,736,362 jobs in parallel, reducing emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional compute.

Thanks to Hydro Québec for keeping the electrons flowing clean and the great facts on Elephants.

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Guestimating Dam Workloads

A rough calculation to figure out how many jobs we could run in parallel using the energy from a single dam. We work backwards from how much energy one job uses to see how far that power could stretch.

1
2const energyPerJobkWh = 0.0037978278;
3const durationSeconds = 178;
4
5// 1. Find energy per kWh
6const energyPerSecond = energyPerJobkWh / durationSeconds;
7const energyPerHour = energyPerSecond * 3600;
8
9console.log("Energy used per job per hour:", energyPerHour.toFixed(6), "kWh");
10
11const totalKWhAvailable = 1900000; // 1,900 MW for 1 hour
12const numberOfJobs = totalKWhAvailable / energyPerHour;
13
14console.log("Jobs that can run in parallel:", Math.floor(numberOfJobs).toLocaleString())
15