Data gold mines, not vampire data centres.
The Hub is a community-owned data centre on the sea floor of the British Columbia coast. Sealed compute pods sit in cold water, run on the power of the tide, shed their heat into the water around them, and turn some of that heat into fresh water for the shore. The host First Nation owns it and is paid first, off the top, before any investor. ISWP is the developer, not the owner. This page is the whole case on one screen: what it is, who owns what, the numbers it stands on, and what is still unproven.
The position
Most infrastructure that lands on Indigenous territory offers the host community a benefit: a royalty, a hiring target, a share of a fund. A benefit is an entitlement, and an entitlement can be revised, renegotiated or revoked. Ownership cannot. The Hub takes a position on this, and the position is the project.
The Nation owns the site-bound assets: the seabed tenure, the tidal array, the pods and the shore node, through a site company it controls. That company is paid a first-priority share of gross revenue, not a share of what is left after everyone else. A separate operator carries the compute risk under a long-term capacity-and-power contract: it buys or leases the GPUs, sells the compute, and lives with the technology cycle. The landlord layer does not.
The model is not ours. It is the structure BC has already financed at scale. Cedar LNG at Kitimat reached a final investment decision on June 25, 2024, with the Haisla Nation holding 50.1% and Pembina 49.9% of a roughly US$4.0 billion facility. The commodity and offtake risk sits with the tollers under 20-year take-or-pay agreements; the Nation owns the facility. Translate feedstock to tide and liquefaction to compute and you have the Hub.
Where ISWP stands: why we are here and what we expect
We will never be first. The Nation is first, and the Nation is the owner. ISWP does not claim co-ownership of a Hub on anyone’s territory. That is not a courtesy on this page; it is the design, and any First Nation reading this should be able to hold us to it.
Why we are here. Inter Species Wisdom Project Inc. is a British Columbia Benefit Company with a public purpose written into its articles. Data centres are drawing more public resistance every month, often from the same people who will queue for the next phone the morning after the protest; the demand is not going away, and the centres are coming to this coast whichever way anyone votes. The only open question is who owns them and who is paid. The Hub is the data centre a community can say yes to: no land, no diesel, no freshwater drawn, heat turned into drinking water, and the revenue flowing to the people whose water it sits in. Done right, the Nation is paid as what it already is, the steward of that water since before there was a province, and the money reaches every member, not a chosen few: housing, language, a school, a fund that outlasts the array. That is what uplift looks like when it is on the cap table instead of in a land acknowledgement. It puts reconciliation where it can be audited: in the ownership terms, not in a speech. The Intelligence Commons, the public forum this site exists for, needs compute that is not rented from a hyperscaler. And the founder lives on this water. Those are the reasons, and they are the whole of it.
What ISWP does. ISWP is the developer. It brought the concept, the published blueprint and its public claims register, the hearings that try to break it, the studies that will price it, the permits and the partners. It carries the project to a financeable decision at its own cost and risk, and it puts its own terms on the table before the Nation is asked to sit down, not after. When the Hub is built, ISWP walks in as the developer under contract to the Nation’s company, not as a shareholder in it.
What ISWP expects. Published here as our opening terms, so they can be read before any meeting and changed in it:
- The host Nation holds not less than 50.1% of the site company and is paid a first-priority share of gross revenue. The capital that builds the array, whether public, Indigenous or private, holds the balance. ISWP holds no shares.
- In place of equity, ISWP is paid a developer’s share of the site company’s distributable cash, earned by the work of reaching a final investment decision and proposed at no more than one-fifth, for the operating life of the first array. It is not transferable, it ends when the term ends, and it never outranks the Nation’s priority share.
- ISWP recovers its documented development costs at the investment decision. It takes no fee before that point, and nothing if the Nation says no.
- A fixed share of ISWP’s own return, and an allocation of the facility’s compute, goes to the Intelligence Commons. That is what a benefit company is for.
- The Nation chairs and controls the site company. ISWP holds one non-voting developer’s seat for the term of its contract, and leaves when it ends.
Each new site is a new Nation, owning its own node on the same terms. No Nation’s Hub is diluted by another’s, and ISWP’s developer’s share on one site gives it nothing on the next.
The number the whole case turns on
Ownership and entitlement can be measured against each other on the same resource, in the same place, in the same year. Alaska runs both.
| Instrument | What it is | 2025 payment |
|---|---|---|
| Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend | An entitlement of residency, paid from a US$86 billion sovereign fund built on oil | US$1,000 per resident |
| Arctic Slope Regional Corporation | Alaska Native equity in the same oil, under the 1971 land claims settlement | US$12,200 on a standard 100-share block |
An ASRC shareholder receives both. Same hydrocarbons, same year, and the difference is ownership. That is the sentence the Hub is built to test on this coast, and it is the reason the ownership layer is designed to be inalienable: equity that can be sold leaks away from the people it was meant for.
Landlord or operator: the fork
There are two ways to earn money from a data centre, and they are about a factor of eight apart per megawatt. Both figures below are derived from arm’s-length, published 2025-2026 prices.
| Model | Revenue per MW of IT load per year | What you must own | At the 5.25 MW design ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colocation landlord: sell space, power and cooling | about US$2.3 million | the pods and the array | about US$12 million a year |
| Compute operator: sell GPU-hours | about US$19 million | the pods, the array, and tens of millions of dollars of GPUs per MW | about US$100 million a year |
The landlord figure comes from CBRE’s 2025 North American average colocation rate (US$194.95 per kW per month, vacancy 1.4%). The operator figure comes from the best comparable that exists, and it is in British Columbia: in June 2026 HIVE’s BUZZ HPC signed a US$220 million, three-year sovereign-AI contract with Bell AI Fabric for Cohere, 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs at Bell’s facility in Merritt. At roughly 120 kW per rack that is about 3.8 MW of IT load, the same electrical size as a full 20-pod Hub, and it works out to about US$19 million per MW per year.
Our position on the fork: the Nation’s site company is the landlord, paid off the top; an operator takes the GPU cycle. The reason is the cost of power. A tidal array, at an unsubsidised cost of energy, consumes most or all of a colocation landlord’s gross revenue and a small fraction of a compute operator’s. So the Hub is financed as a landlord with an operator’s tenant, and the operator’s contract is what makes the array bankable. Whether the array’s cost of power lands low enough to reopen the pure-landlord case depends on public and Indigenous energy capital, and that is one of the questions a feasibility study exists to answer.
Scale, as published
The Hub is a ladder, not a single build, and every number on this site is priced against the same three steps. One pod is the claim under test; the other two are disclosed so nobody can say we hid the ambition.
| Step | Pods | IT load (total draw) | Tidal units to match, at 70 kW installed and 40% capacity factor | Fresh water |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot | 1 | 0.25 MW (0.26 MW) | about 10 | 10,000 litres a day |
| Commercial | 5 | 1.25 MW (1.31 MW) | about 47 | 50,000 litres a day |
| Design ceiling | 20 | 5.0 MW (5.25 MW) | about 188 | roadmap |
Pods are modular and comparatively cheap to add. The array is not. Roughly ten tidal units per pod means compute ambition and the ecological ledger pull against each other permanently, and at the upper steps the array is very likely more than the ecology can carry as currently argued. We published that against our own interest, in the Master Blueprint (v2), with the correction record that produced it.
The water is small as revenue and large as politics. The Sunshine Coast Regional District’s own emergency ration is 350 litres per connection per day; a five-pod Hub’s water covers on the order of 140 connections at that ration, and the design ceiling covers many more. On a coast that reaches Stage 4 drought most summers, that is the number the room remembers.
The resource: base plus options
The Hub is built for the 1.5 to 2.5 metre-per-second tidal resource we can permit first, with a mapped upgrade path to faster sites in partnership with the Nations who hold them.
Power in a tidal current scales with the cube of its speed: double the flow and the same rotor yields eight times the energy. The base site is deliberately gentle. It is a flow that low-speed device classes with a documented record can serve, it is fish-safe and quiet, and it is in the inlet system of the Nation we would ask first. The fast water is the option ladder, not the starting line: the very fastest passages (Skookumchuck Narrows up to 17.7 knots, Nakwakto Rapids up to 17, Seymour Narrows up to 15) are too violent, too trafficked or too protected to build in, and the bankable band sits below them.
The province has that band in quantity. A 2006 National Research Council inventory counted 190 Canadian tidal sites with mean potential power above 1 MW, more than 42,000 MW in total, with British Columbia holding the most sites. A 2022 University of Victoria study mapped roughly 90 square kilometres of practical tidal resource in its BC study region, about 22 square kilometres of it techno-economically feasible near nine remote First Nations communities, four of them promising candidates. Each of those is a future node, owned by the Nation whose water it sits in. That is the growth model: not one facility diluted across many owners, but many facilities, each owned first by its host.
What has been tested, and what has not
The Hub is on trial in this Commons. Hearing #6: The Hub on Trial opened August 11, 2026, with the one-pod pilot as the claim under test. Round 2, the Cross, published September 2, found against the claim on water, community, ecology and trust, and could not assess power. The sharpest finding was ours to admit: the host Nation had not yet been asked in writing. We asked in writing on September 3, 2026; the Nation opened a file the next day. Round 3 answers that first, published September 8, and the Finding follows.
Nothing on this page is a done deal. The technical feasibility, the array-average output in a real channel, the slack-water thermal case, the cost of power, and above all the Nation’s decision are open. What is settled is the structure: if the Hub is built, the host Nation owns it and is paid first.
What comes next
Two studies, in order. First, a techno-economic feasibility study of the pilot: array, pods, shore node, thermal case, water yield, ecology. Second, an economics study of the ownership structure itself: what share of gross revenue a host Nation can hold before the project becomes unfinanceable, measured against what benefit agreements actually deliver. BC has run that experiment in public. The 2024 Call for Power required a minimum 25% First Nations equity and still cleared at a weighted average of $74 per MWh, with $2.5 to 3 billion of assets in First Nations ownership. Nobody has yet measured the cost of ownership from that record. The Hub gives the question a site.
Partner or poke holes
If you are a marine engineer, a cooling specialist, a community-energy practitioner, an economist, or a community that might host a node, the convener wants your objections before he wants your endorsement. Contact the Commons.
Sources
- Cedar LNG, “Cedar LNG Announces Positive Final Investment Decision,” June 25, 2024: cedarlng.com (50.1% / 49.9%, US$4.0 billion, 20-year take-or-pay tolling). Verified September 2, 2026.
- Alaska Department of Revenue, 2025 Permanent Fund Dividend amount, September 22, 2025: dor.alaska.gov; Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, At a Glance: apfc.org. Verified August 31, 2026.
- Arctic Slope Regional Corporation 2025 dividend, Alaska Business Magazine 2025 Regional Roundup: akbizmag.com. Verified August 31, 2026.
- HIVE Digital Technologies, “BUZZ HPC Closes USD $220 Million Sovereign AI GPU Contract with Bell AI Fabric for Cohere Inc.,” June 18, 2026: newsfilecorp.com. Verified August 31, 2026. Per-MW figure is our arithmetic: 2,304 GPUs at 72 per rack = 32 racks; at about 120 kW per rack = about 3.8 MW; US$73.3 million a year / 3.8 MW.
- CBRE, “Fast-Growing North American Data Center Market Set Records in 2025,” February 26, 2026: cbre.com. Verified August 31, 2026. Per-MW figure is our arithmetic: US$194.95 x 1,000 kW x 12 months.
- BC Hydro, statement on BCUC acceptance of the 2024 Call for Power electricity purchase agreements, August 25, 2025: bchydro.com. Verified August 31, 2026.
- Cornett, A., “Inventory of Canada’s Marine Renewable Energy Resources,” NRC Canadian Hydraulics Centre, CHC-TR-041, 2006: natural-resources.canada.ca. Verified September 2, 2026.
- Richardson, Buckham and McWhinnie, “Mapping a blue energy future for British Columbia,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 157 (2022): abstract. Verified September 2, 2026.
- Peak currents: Skookumchuck Narrows and Seymour Narrows (Wikipedia; DFO current stations exist for both), Nakwakto Rapids (Global News, 2016). Verified September 2, 2026. Peak spring values; mean flows are far lower.
- Sunshine Coast Regional District water capacity objectives (750 L per connection per day; 350 L under emergency conditions), Coast Reporter: coastreporter.net. Verified August 31, 2026.
- Hub scale ladder, tidal unit assumptions and water figures: The Hub Master Blueprint (v2), as revised August 26, 2026.
Inter Species Wisdom Project Inc. – A British Columbia Benefit Company – “Now that you know, what will you do?”