As long as I can remember, I have worked in the IT sector. In 1999, I was still a teenager and we launched GloboTech Communications, our web hosting company, with Charles Theriault. GloboTech still exists, 22 years later. Then in 2017, we built Bitfarms, which has become a Canadian leader in the emerging blockchain industry, with a market capitalization of over C $ 1 billion. I stepped down as the president of Bitfarms in 2019, and quickly saw that the data center industry was going to experience phenomenal growth as these technological infrastructures are the backbone of the internet. We were able to find a large enough industrial site (187,500 square feet in total), with enough electrical capacity (24 MW), and enough connectivity to build our data center. A rare find in Montreal! We quickly got to work, building the first phase of our data center in an uncertain economy, with the Covid-19 pandemic. The global demand for colocation services is phenomenal, especially when these infrastructures run on hydropower.
If the demand is there, the current offer in Canada can be improved significantly. Because data centers today, often supported by foreign investment funds, are getting bigger and bigger, with mergers and acquisitions that keep them away from certain customers with specific needs. There is a need for more transparency in the data center industry. Lack of price transparency: Sometimes large data center customers end up with surprises on their invoices, and no one to talk to quickly. Lack of transparency in the infrastructure itself: customers want to monitor their power consumption, network condition or the temperature of their servers in real time. With Enovum, we want to offer our customers transparency: no more surprises at the end of the month on your bill; and thanks to our interface, customers will be able to monitor in real time the physical and virtual environment in which their data resides. We were right: our phase 1 is already sold out. We will begin our second phase: we have no doubt that the demand will follow.
See you soon for more good news,
Pierre-Luc Quimper
President and Founder, Enovum
