Amarah Hasham-Steele

Since Prime Minister Carney called off trade negotiations with the US last Friday, much of the has on the physical goods now affected by Trump's 50% tariffs. Beer! Hockey sticks! Essential oils for some reason! But the true stakes of this trade war are overwhelmingly digital.

The politician licks his lips. The clip then cuts quickly to him winking at the camera before turning his head to the side and smiling. In the clip after, he laughs while readjusting his AirPod in a motion that mimics tucking hair behind one’s ear. The soundtrack is Shaggy’s steamy reggae hit “Boombastic.” The star of the show? Prime Minister Mark Carney. This Instagram reel, posted last June to an account called markcarneythirst, has nearly 30,000 likes and over a thousand comments.

New data centres are being announced all over North America—and beyond. Some provide power at a smaller scale, but others (sometimes referred to as “hyperscale”) provide the necessary power for large-scale cloud service providers, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. These, in turn, provide the necessary compute for artificial intelligence platforms. The demand for these services is growing, as is their footprint.