There's several criteria looked at by companies picking which cloud data centres to leverage. The biggest ones usually being:
1. Reliability
2. Latency
3. Price
For reliability, a lot is up to how the systems themselves are designed, with one major caveat. Site redundancy. If this project is truly a single datacenter, most serious businesses are out for using it for critical workloads on that fact alone, relegating it to exploratory/experimental work.
Latency is a product of geography. The further something is away from the end user, the higher the minimum possible latency. This is why data centres are usually built near-ish large population centres. Really Vancouver and Southern Ontario are the only logical places to build huge data centres in Canada. Even then, most Canadian companies run off sites in the northern US.
What does this leave to make this project feasible? Price. This is where government subsidies can make this financially appealing to serve people overlooking the above two points. Hence why this irks a bunch of us, it's going to be public money to make this thing feasible, and it's going to create a minimal amount of jobs. A few security guards, and a couple nerds to swap dead hardware.
I'm big on the clean energy wagon, but I'd rather see us subsidize a refinery or petrochemical complex instead of this as it would actually make sense to improve the local economy.
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