PowerBank Announces First 2 MW Modular Data Center in Ontario with Potential Annual Lease Revenue of Approximately C$2 Million

Project designed to accommodate approximately 500 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, to be provided by an AI cloud tenant

30-year site lease establishes first AI infrastructure project under strategic partnership, the first of several planned sites across Ontario

, /PRNewswire/ -- PowerBank Corporation (Nasdaq: PBK ) (Cboe CA: PBK) (FSE: 103) (" PowerBank " or the " Company "), a leader in independent energy development and asset ownership in North America, is pleased to announce that its joint development partner has executed the first lease and it is in development of a 2 MW modular data center in Ontario (the " Project ") under a joint development agreement. The Project is the first of several sites PowerBank plans to develop across Ontario. PowerBank expects to earn revenue by leasing the Project's powered shell to an AI cloud operator, which would install and operate its own GPUs. If a tenant is secured on the terms assumed below, and the Project is permitted, financed, constructed and operational, the Project could generate approximately C$2 million in annual lease revenue, to be shared between PowerBank and its partner under the joint development agreement.

The Project responds to a structural shift in how AI compute is deployed. As AI moves from training large models to running them for businesses and consumers every day, inference is projected to account for approximately 60% of AI compute demand by 2030 and to grow at roughly 36% per year, according to McKinsey & Company. 1 McKinsey expects inference compute to be distributed across cloud, enterprise, edge and device, with location driven by economics, latency and data control. 1 Workloads such as real-time video analytics, industrial automation, voice and physical AI perform best when compute sits close to where data is generated, rather than in a distant hyperscale campus.

Demand for this distributed capacity is growing quickly. Grand View Research estimates that the global edge data center market will reach US$105.8 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 14.9% from 2026, with North America accounting for the largest regional share at 35.5% in 2025. 2 At the same time, access to power has become a gating factor for new data center capacity, with large-load interconnection queues stretching for years in many North American markets. Modular edge data centers that can plug into existing generation and distribution infrastructure address both needs: they place compute close to users while drawing on power that is already available.

"Compute is following power, and the companies that already have power in the ground are the ones that will win the next phase of AI," said Dr. Richard Lu, Chief Executive Officer of PowerBank. "This first lease shows our model at work: an energy site we have already developed now positioned to earn a second revenue stream from AI infrastructure. As inference moves closer to the people and businesses who use it, North America will need many smaller data centers built in months, not a handful of giant campuses built over years. PowerBank's portfolio is positioned for exactly that shift, and we expect this to be the first of many sites we advance with our partner."

Risks and Assumptions

The purpose of the revenue guidance, which is a financial outlook, is to assist investors, shareholders, and others in understanding certain financial metrics relating to the Project for evaluating the performance of the Company's business and is dated as of the date of this press release. This information may not be appropriate for other purposes. Information about the Company's revenue guidance, including the various assumptions underlying it, is forward-looking and should be read in conjunction with the disclosure below and under "Forward-Looking Statements" in this press release and the related disclosure and information about various economic, competitive, and regulatory assumptions, factors, and risks that may cause the Company's actual future financial and operating results to differ from what it currently expects.

The capital cost of the Project's facility, including land, the modular data center shell, electrical systems, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and fiber connectivity, is estimated at approximately C$10 million, to be funded by PowerBank and its partner. 3,4 GPUs, servers and related computing equipment are not included in this estimate and are expected to be purchased by the tenant for its own use. Based on current-generation NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems, which require direct-to-chip liquid cooling, a facility with approximately 1.77 MW of IT capacity could accommodate approximately 500 GPUs across 11 racks, with approximately 220 TB of aggregate GPU memory. 3,5,6

The Project is expected to require a zoning by-law amendment and a building permit from the local municipality, and the parties are coordinating a pre-consultation meeting with the municipality to confirm these and any other requirements. None of these approvals has yet been obtained. Subject to receipt of the required approvals, construction is expected to take approximately 8 to 12 months, with commercial operation currently anticipated in PowerBank's fiscal year 2028, ending June 30, 2028. PowerBank has not yet entered into an agreement with a tenant for the Project's capacity and are in discussions with several potential tenants.