BC Has the Energy Resources to be an AI Powerhouse, But Has it Missed the Boat?

In May 2023, David Eby sounded like a premier who wanted British Columbia to lean into the AI wave. Speaking in Nanaimo, he called AI “a very significant new technology” with “incredible opportunities,” while conceding governments had to stay alert to disruption.

Two years later, the mood around AI in B.C. feels more like managed scarcity than frontier optimism, and it is not because the world cooled on the technology.

AI is now a permanent feature of the business economy, from customer service and marketing to logistics, design, and forecasting. The OECD’s 2025 G7 discussion paper on AI adoption by SMEs (the one you shared) notes that AI use remains much lower in small firms than big ones, but is rising fast, and it links AI uptake to productivity gains..

And yet B.C.’s posture has shifted from “let’s seize it” to “we need to ration it,” with AI grouped alongside other electricity-hungry sectors.

The grid math keeps tightening

By summer 2025, Eby was still selling the province as a destination. When B.C. Hydro opened a new call for independent power proposals, he invited American producers to “come relocate,” pitching clean electricity as an industrial advantage and framing new supply as an economic driver.

But the grid math kept tightening. By October, the province was pitching a new framework that would explicitly push AI and data centres into a competitive process for access to power, while prioritizing mines and other “public interest” projects. In the government’s own framing, the point was to avoid infrastructure falling behind demand and pushing costs onto households. “We won’t make that mistake,” Energy Minister Adrian Dix said, promising to prioritize projects that deliver the greatest benefit to British Columbians.

B.C. is acting like an energy-constrained jurisdiction, instead of the AI jurisdiction it can be. Under the new approach, AI companies and data centres would bid for defined allocations of electricity, while cryptocurrency mining would be shut out permanently. The shift is described plainly in the government’s own policy rollout on AI power.

The “low employment” myth

Eby’s justification has been blunt. “These AI data centres use a huge amount of electricity and provide relatively low levels of employment,” he said, as the province advanced legislation to accelerate a major transmission build while tightening the gate on emerging tech.

None of this makes Eby anti-AI. He seems to be a premier trying to reconcile two realities that are now colliding: the AI boom is real, and so is the electricity constraint. The problem is that the collision is forcing B.C. into a defensive crouch just as other places are sprinting.

Even critics of B.C.’s approach argue AI is not optional, only energy-intensive. Some have warned that data-centre demand is accelerating, while B.C. has been relying heavily on imports, making the province less competitive and less secure; it cited record imports and the rising cost of outside electricity in the electron gap.

The overlooked advantage: Natural gas

This is where B.C.’s overlooked advantage should re-enter the conversation: natural gas.

B.C. is blessed with two major clean-energy assets, hydro and gas, and that the “electrify everything” imperative is starting to strain the system. B.C. should be less doctrinaire about when and where it uses gas to bridge shortfalls and keep industry moving.

The intriguing part is that B.C.’s AI conversation is already converging on the same constraint. On Power Struggle, Vancouver’s Kris Krüg put it crisply: “every conversation about AI has gone from algorithms to energy usage. That is the name of the game right now.” He also argues Indigenous economic leadership and data governance should be built into the AI stack early, not bolted on later, which is exactly the kind of B.C.-specific synthesis that could make the province more than a branch plant of foreign platforms.

Ottawa, meanwhile, is funding compute and “sovereign AI,” but the Hill Times warns that infrastructure is not where compounding value is captured. The real prize is building the companies that sit on top of it. That warning lands harder in B.C., where policy is actively selecting which kinds of load get to connect first.

Bottleneck or bridge?

There is a wider strategic link here to natural resources and export competitiveness. Ottawa and Alberta have even folded “cloud sovereignty” and AI compute into a broader decarbonization and industrial strategy that includes nuclear power and carbon capture. And the clean-energy argument for B.C.’s resource economy is also getting sharper, with major institutions claiming Canadian LNG can displace coal abroad and cut global emissions.

The risk for B.C. is that it ends up with the worst of both worlds, with an AI economy that arrives late, and an energy policy that treats innovation as a nuisance.

The world is not waiting. AI has already reshaped jobs, capital spending, and policy debates, with mental health and trust questions riding alongside massive investment and layoffs.

Eby’s 2023 instinct was right: AI is opportunity with real risks. However, electricity is the bottleneck. The open question is whether B.C. will use its gas advantage, and its natural-resource strengths, to turn that bottleneck into a bridge, or whether it will simply manage decline by queue number.