The most telling document in the current industrial landscape is not a rezoning application or a corporate press release. It is a queue.

BC Hydro's large customer interconnection queue has grown by approximately 40 per cent since 2023, with data centres representing the fastest-growing category of applicants. Each entry represents a company that has identified British Columbia's renewable electricity grid as a strategic asset. The queue is, in effect, a ledger of capital waiting to land.

Metro Vancouver planners, regional district staff, and municipal economic development officers are now racing to determine if the land to receive that capital actually exists.

What is at stake

According to JLL's Data Centre Outlook, global data centre construction investment reached USD $49-billion in 2025, with the Pacific Northwest ranking among the top three target regions. This growth is driven by the infrastructure requirements of artificial intelligence, which demand power densities that older facilities were never designed to accommodate.

Metro Vancouver offers a compelling convergence of fundamentals. The region's temperate climate reduces mechanical cooling costs compared to hotter inland markets. BC Hydro's grid provides the low-carbon power profile that hyperscalers require for sustainability commitments. Furthermore, decades of investment in subsea and terrestrial fibre infrastructure provide latency advantages for serving both North American and Asia-Pacific traffic.

The investment associated with a single hyperscale campus—typically 100 to 500 megawatts of IT load capacity—runs into the hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars in construction alone. If that investment does not find a home here, it will go elsewhere. Calgary has courted operators with streamlined industrial approvals and lower land costs, while Seattle's established corridor in the Quincy-East Wenatchee area continues to absorb regional demand.

The binding constraint

CBRE's Q4 2025 Metro Vancouver industrial market report placed the region's industrial vacancy rate at approximately 3.2 per cent—among the tightest in North America. Rising rents have compressed the economics for operators requiring large, contiguous parcels.

Data centres are demanding tenants. A hyperscale facility requires a footprint of 20 to 50 acres, proximity to high-voltage transmission infrastructure, access to substantial water for cooling, and specialized floor-load capacities. The power requirement alone is a hurdle: a 100-megawatt facility needs a dedicated substation, requiring BC Hydro interconnection approval and often significant transmission upgrades.

The Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) adds another layer of complexity. The ALR covers substantial portions of the Fraser Valley, where land parcels large enough for hyperscale campuses might otherwise be found. The Agricultural Land Commission has historically treated data centre applications for ALR exclusion with skepticism, and recent decisions have not consistently favoured technology infrastructure over agricultural preservation.

Metro Vancouver Regional District's industrial land inventory analysis has documented a structural shortfall between projected industrial demand and the developable land base. While data centres were not the primary use case when those projections were built, their arrival has increased the urgency of the findings.

Where the opportunity is moving

Abbotsford and Chilliwack—both located in the Fraser Valley Regional District and operating under different land-use frameworks—have emerged as the most active sites for data centre development. Abbotsford’s position along the Trans-Canada corridor, its access to BC Hydro transmission infrastructure, and its larger inventory of serviceable industrial land provide structural advantages that Metro Vancouver municipalities struggle to replicate.

For operators willing to accept slightly longer fibre runs, the Fraser Valley proposition is increasingly compelling. For AI training infrastructure, which is less latency-sensitive than transactional workloads, this trade-off is often acceptable.

Colocation operators including Digital Realty and Equinix have disclosed ongoing Pacific Northwest expansion activity in investor materials. The competition between Vancouver, Calgary, and Seattle for these facilities remains intense.

The policy gap

The region lacks a land-use framework that treats data centre infrastructure as an economic priority. Municipal official community plans vary widely in how they classify data centre uses, creating regulatory inconsistency that adds time and uncertainty to site selection.

The solution requires a coordinated policy response: identifying parcels within the existing industrial land base best suited for energy-intensive infrastructure, pre-zoning them, and working with BC Hydro to sequence interconnection approvals.

Colliers International's Pacific Northwest data centre market analysis notes that site-to-shovel timelines in Metro Vancouver currently run significantly longer than in competing markets—a gap that serves as a competitive disadvantage.

Metro Vancouver possesses the climate, the power, and the connectivity to win a meaningful share of this infrastructure build-out. The question is whether the region's land-use systems can evolve quickly enough to capture it.