Accountability
Every number, and where it came from
This site mixes three kinds of numbers, and the label on each tile tells you which: our own design targets, published benchmarks about the comparator world, and published projections. Anything we cannot source, we cut. Figures marked to-verify are scheduled for source verification before our public launch.
| Figure | Value | Type | Source | Accessed | Caveats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design-target water use, Canadian Vault sites | 0.2 L/kWh | Design target | Internal design target | — | An engineering goal for closed-loop cooling at hydro-adjacent sites — not a measurement. No facility has been built. |
| Typical US data-centre on-site water use | 1.5–1.8 L/kWh | Published benchmark · to verify | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for the U.S. Department of Energy | 2026-09-10 | Range covers direct on-site (evaporative) water use; varies widely by climate and cooling design. |
| Projected global AI water withdrawal in 2027 | 4.2–6.6 billion m³ | Published projection | Li, Yang, Islam & Ren (UC Riverside) — Communications of the ACM / arXiv:2304.03271 | 2026-09-10 | 4.2–6.6 billion cubic metres — 4–6× the annual water withdrawal of Denmark. |
| Freshwater evaporated training GPT-3 in US data centres | 700,000 L | Published projection | Li, Yang, Islam & Ren (UC Riverside) — Communications of the ACM / arXiv:2304.03271 | 2026-09-10 | — |
| US data centres’ direct (on-site) water use in 2023 | ~17 billion gal | Published benchmark | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for the U.S. Department of Energy | 2026-09-10 | Hyperscale facilities alone are projected to reach 16–33 billion gallons per year by 2028. |
| Projected US hyperscale data-centre water use by 2028 | 16–33 billion gal/yr | Published projection | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for the U.S. Department of Energy | 2026-09-10 | — |
| US data centres drawing cooling water from stressed watersheds | ~1 in 5 | Published benchmark | Environmental Research Letters | 2026-09-10 | Nearly half of US servers rely on electricity from water-stressed regions. |
| Water consumed by Virginia data centres in 2023 (+86% since 2019) | 2.1 billion gal | Published benchmark | JLARC, Commonwealth of Virginia | 2026-09-10 | — |
| The Oregonian’s public-records suit forced Google to stop treating The Dalles water use as a trade secret | 2022 | Published benchmark | The Oregonian / Wikipedia | 2026-09-10 | — |
| US data-centre projects blocked or delayed by local opposition, 2024–2025 | $64B | Published benchmark | Data Center Watch | 2026-09-10 | — |
| Grid intensity at proposed Canadian Vault regions | 38 gCO₂/kWh | Design target · to verify | Canadian Vault (internal, CC-BY-4.0) | 2026-09-10 | Illustrative figure drawn from public provincial grid-intensity references (EIA, NRCan); re-verify against the latest National Inventory Report before publication. |
| Grid intensity, US East (Virginia) reference | 420 gCO₂/kWh | Published benchmark · to verify | Canadian Vault (internal, CC-BY-4.0) | 2026-09-10 | Illustrative comparator from the same public references; re-verify against the latest EPA eGRID release. |
| Hydro share of the proposed energy mix | 80 % | Design target | Internal design target | — | Design assumption: provincial hydro grids plus on-site renewables and storage where sites are remote. |
| Design-target PUE | 1.20 | Design target | Internal design target | — | Power Usage Effectiveness — the ratio of total facility energy to IT energy. 1.20 is an aggressive cold-climate goal, not an operating result. |
| Industry-average PUE comparator | 1.45 | Published benchmark · to verify | Uptime Institute | 2026-09-10 | Recent global surveys report averages in the ~1.45–1.6 band; pin the exact edition before publication. |
| Free-air cooling days at northern sites (design) | 280+ days/yr | Design target · to verify | Internal design target | — | Derived from Environment and Climate Change Canada climate normals for the proposed regions; show the derivation on /methodology before publishing as more than a target. |
| Proposed locations under evaluation | 13 | Design target | Internal design target | — | All sites are conceptual. None has land, permits, power agreements, or funding. |
| Proposed initial → target capacity per site | 1–3 → 25 MW | Design target | Internal design target | — | — |
| Pre-seed round sought (concept validation) | $50K | Design target | Internal design target | — | — |
What our targets exclude
- Embodied carbon of construction and equipment.
- Upstream energy generation impacts outside the operating boundary.
- Any customer-side efficiency claims: we measure our halls, not your models.
The illustrative US comparators (grid carbon, PUE, water) trace to public references compiled in our 2025 impact worksheet (EIA, NRCan provincial grid intensities) and are scheduled for re-verification against the latest LBNL, eGRID and Uptime Institute editions before public launch.