Why Data Centers Will Create Electricity Abundance
There is concern that the energy requirements of data centers will consume so much electricity that demand will overwhelm supply. While this is certainly a possible outcome, the actual impact may have the opposite effect.
For starters, while the total consumption of electricity by data centers is significant and growing, credible estimates point to manageable amounts. For example, an article published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, published in November 2025, summarized estimates from several top tier research institutions: McKinsey, Berkeley National Lab, Goldman Sachs, EPRI, and Grid Strategies. All five of them estimated total data center electricity consumption in the U.S. in 2023 at 150 terawatt-hours (150,000 gigawatt-hours). But their future estimates sharply diverge. At the end of their projection range, for 2028, their estimates varied from a low of 200 terawatt-hours to a high of 450 terawatt-hours.
To put this in perspective, total U.S. electricity consumption in 2024 was estimated at 4 million gigawatt-hours, or 4,000 terawatt-hours. So data centers consumed not quite 4 percent of total U.S. electrical consumption in 2024, and are projected to consume as much as 11.3 percent of total U.S. electrical consumption in 2028. This higher percentage is corroborated by the International Energy Agency’s “base case” scenario, where they estimate total electricity consumption by U.S. data centers to reach 426 terawatt-hours by 2030.
Piling another 10+ percent of demand onto the U.S. electricity grid is indeed a big deal, but compared to the goals of electrification – at least here in California – for other sectors such as home heating/cooling and EVs, it is the smaller slice. California currently consumes not quite 300,000 gigawatt-hours per year, with an official goal to increase that to 500,000 GWh by 2045. As we estimated in WC #121, converting the state’s entire road-based transportation fleet to EVs would consume approximately 120,000 GWh per year, whereas if data centers used 11.3 percent of California’s current electricity demand, that would only be around 34,000 GWh.
Still, that’s a lot of juice. But when considering how that electricity will be generated, the scenario gets quite interesting. Because the tech companies that are pouring money into data centers aren’t going to balk at developing their own onsite sources of electricity. Across America, tech companies are investing in a variety of ways to produce their own power, and they are definitely pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy.
How Apple Pay Transformed Casino Payments in Canada, Says MobilePayCasinos
The way Canadians pay for goods and services has changed dramatically over the past decade, and few sectors have felt this shift more acutely than online gambling. When Apple Pay launched in Canada in November 2015, it arrived as a contactless payment tool designed primarily for retail and everyday transactions. Few observers at the time predicted that within a few years it would become one of the most trusted deposit methods at online casinos operating in the Canadian market. Yet that is precisely what happened, driven by a combination of regulatory evolution, shifting consumer expectations around privacy, and the technical infrastructure that Apple had quietly built into its ecosystem. The transformation was not instantaneous, but it was thorough, and understanding how it unfolded reveals a great deal about how digital payments and regulated gambling intersect in Canada today.
The Regulatory and Banking Context That Made Apple Pay Necessary
To appreciate why Apple Pay gained traction in Canadian casino payments, it is essential to understand the friction that existed before it arrived. Canadian banks have historically maintained a cautious relationship with online gambling transactions. Under the Criminal Code of Canada, gambling regulation is a provincial matter, and for many years the only fully legal online casinos were those operated by provincial lottery corporations — entities like OLG in Ontario, Loto-Québec, and PlayNow in British Columbia. Privately operated online casinos, even those licensed in reputable offshore jurisdictions such as Malta, Gibraltar, or Kahnawake, existed in a legal grey zone for Canadian players.
That grey zone created a practical problem: Canadian banks and credit card issuers frequently declined transactions coded as gambling-related, particularly when the merchant was registered outside Canada. Visa and Mastercard both maintained merchant category codes that allowed issuing banks to block gambling charges, and many of Canada’s major financial institutions — including RBC, TD, and Scotiabank — exercised that option selectively. Players who wanted to fund casino accounts often found their deposits declined at the card level, not because of any legal prohibition, but because of internal risk policies at the bank.
This environment created demand for payment intermediaries that could process transactions without triggering the same flags. E-wallets like Neteller and Skrill filled part of this gap, but they required account registration, identity verification, and in some cases carried their own withdrawal restrictions for Canadian users. Apple Pay entered this landscape with a structural advantage: it processes transactions through the user’s existing card but presents a tokenized, device-specific account number to the merchant rather than the actual card number. In many cases, this meant that transactions processed through Apple Pay were categorized differently at the acquiring bank level, reducing the incidence of declines that plagued direct card deposits.
The regulatory picture shifted significantly in April 2022, when Ontario launched its regulated iGaming market under iGaming Ontario, a subsidiary of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO). This was a landmark development — it created the first open, competitive, privately operated online casino market in a Canadian province. Operators like bet365, DraftKings, and PokerStars obtained licenses and began accepting Ontario players through a framework that required compliance with responsible gambling standards, anti-money laundering protocols, and transparent payment practices. Within this regulated environment, the legitimacy of Apple Pay as a deposit method became far less ambiguous. Licensed operators were required to verify player identity and maintain transaction records, which aligned with the kind of payment traceability that Apple Pay’s architecture supports.
How Apple Pay’s Technical Architecture Suits Casino Transactions
Apple Pay is built on a technology called tokenization, combined with biometric authentication. When a user adds a card to Apple Wallet, the actual card number is never stored on the device or transmitted to the merchant. Instead, Apple’s servers generate a Device Account Number (DAN), a unique token tied to that specific device. Each transaction also generates a dynamic security code that is valid only for that single payment. This architecture means that even if a casino’s payment processor were compromised, the data exposed would be useless for fraudulent transactions — the token cannot be reused, and the original card number is never present in the transaction chain.
For casino operators, this matters for several reasons. Online gambling platforms are high-value targets for fraud, including card testing attacks in which criminals use stolen card numbers to make small deposits and verify whether a card is active before using it for larger fraudulent purchases elsewhere. Because Apple Pay tokens are device-specific and require Face ID, Touch ID, or passcode authentication to authorize, they are essentially immune to this type of attack. A stolen card number cannot be used through Apple Pay without physical access to the enrolled device and the biometric or PIN credentials.
The speed of Apple Pay transactions is also relevant in the casino context. Deposits processed through Apple Pay typically clear in seconds, which matters to players who want to fund a session without interruption. Traditional bank transfers and even some e-wallet methods involve delays of minutes to hours, which can disrupt the user experience. Apple Pay’s near-instantaneous processing is made possible by the fact that it rides on existing card rails — the underlying transaction is still a card payment, processed through Visa or Mastercard networks — but the authentication step is completed on the device before the transaction is even submitted, eliminating the back-and-forth that slows down 3D Secure card payments.
Researchers and industry analysts tracking Canadian iGaming payment trends have noted that Apple Pay adoption among casino players correlates strongly with mobile device usage patterns. Canada has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, and iPhone users represent a substantial share of that market. According to data from Statista, Apple’s iOS held approximately 55 to 58 percent of the Canadian smartphone market share as of 2023, meaning that the potential user base for Apple Pay in Canada is larger than in many European markets where Android dominates. This demographic reality gave Apple Pay a structural advantage in reaching Canadian casino players that it does not necessarily enjoy in markets like Germany or the Netherlands.
Resources like this page have documented the gradual expansion of Apple Pay acceptance across Canadian-facing casino platforms, noting that the shift accelerated noticeably after Ontario’s regulated market opened in 2022, when licensed operators began standardizing their payment infrastructure to meet AGCO requirements and player expectations simultaneously.
Operator Adoption, Player Behavior, and the Withdrawal Problem
Despite its advantages on the deposit side, Apple Pay’s integration into Canadian casino payments has not been without complications. The most persistent issue is that Apple Pay cannot currently be used for withdrawals from casino accounts. This is a fundamental limitation of how the service is designed — Apple Pay is a payment initiation method, not a stored value account. There is no mechanism within the Apple Pay framework for a merchant to push funds back to a user’s Apple Wallet in the way that a bank transfer or e-wallet withdrawal works. When a player wants to withdraw winnings, they must use a separate method: bank transfer, Interac e-Transfer, cheque, or a compatible e-wallet.
This asymmetry has shaped how Canadian players use Apple Pay at casinos. Survey data collected by iGaming industry research firms in 2023 suggested that players who use Apple Pay for deposits tend to be comfortable with the two-method approach — depositing through Apple Pay for its speed and security, then withdrawing via Interac e-Transfer, which has become the dominant withdrawal method in the Canadian market due to its domestic banking integration and relatively fast processing times of one to three business days. Interac e-Transfer is a Canadian-specific service with no direct equivalent in most other markets, and its coexistence with Apple Pay has created a functional payment workflow that many Canadian casino players find satisfactory even if it is not seamless.
Operator adoption of Apple Pay has been uneven across the Canadian market. Platforms operating under Ontario’s iGaming framework have generally been quicker to integrate Apple Pay, partly because the licensing process requires robust payment infrastructure and partly because the regulated environment attracts operators with more sophisticated technical teams. Offshore-licensed platforms that accept Canadian players without Ontario licenses have been slower to adopt Apple Pay, in some cases because their payment processors lack the agreements with Apple necessary to support the service, and in other cases because their player base skews toward desktop users who are less likely to use mobile-first payment methods.
The deposit limits associated with Apple Pay at casinos are also worth noting. Apple Pay transactions are subject to the spending limits set by the user’s underlying card, but casino platforms typically impose their own minimum and maximum deposit thresholds. At most Ontario-licensed casinos, Apple Pay deposits are accepted from as low as ten Canadian dollars, with maximums that vary by operator but commonly fall in the range of five hundred to one thousand dollars per transaction. High-volume players who want to deposit larger sums in a single transaction often find these limits constraining and may prefer bank transfers for larger deposits while using Apple Pay for routine session funding.
MobilePayCasinos, a Canadian-focused review and information platform that has tracked mobile payment adoption in the iGaming sector since the early 2020s, has observed that Apple Pay’s share of total casino deposits among Canadian players grew steadily between 2021 and 2024, with the sharpest increase occurring in the twelve months following Ontario’s market opening. The platform attributes this growth not only to the technical advantages of Apple Pay but to a broader cultural shift in which Canadian consumers became more comfortable with mobile-first financial transactions across all categories, from grocery payments to investment apps, normalizing the behavior that transferred naturally into the casino context.
Privacy, Responsible Gambling, and the Future of Mobile Casino Payments in Canada
One dimension of Apple Pay’s appeal that is often underappreciated in industry discussions is its privacy architecture. When a player deposits at an online casino using a credit or debit card directly, the transaction appears on their bank statement with a merchant descriptor that typically identifies the casino by name. For players who are concerned about privacy — whether because they share bank accounts with family members, because their employer has policies around gambling, or simply because they prefer to keep their recreational spending discreet — this visibility can be a deterrent. Apple Pay does not eliminate the transaction from the underlying card statement, but the merchant descriptor that appears is often less specific, and the tokenized nature of the transaction means that the casino never receives the player’s actual card number, reducing the data trail at the operator level.
This privacy dimension intersects in complex ways with responsible gambling frameworks. Canadian regulators, particularly the AGCO in Ontario, require licensed operators to implement self-exclusion tools, deposit limits, and cooling-off periods. These tools are tied to the player’s account rather than their payment method, meaning that Apple Pay does not circumvent any of the responsible gambling controls that a licensed platform is required to maintain. A player who has set a monthly deposit limit of two hundred dollars will find that limit enforced regardless of whether they try to deposit via Apple Pay, Visa, or Interac. The payment method is agnostic to the account-level controls.
However, the speed and convenience of Apple Pay do raise questions that responsible gambling researchers have begun to examine. Frictionless payment methods reduce the cognitive pause that can occur when a player manually enters card details — a pause that some behavioral economists argue serves a mild protective function by creating a moment of reflection before a financial commitment is made. Apple Pay’s one-touch authentication eliminates that friction almost entirely. Whether this meaningfully affects gambling behavior at the population level remains an open empirical question. Studies from the UK, where frictionless digital payments have been standard in online gambling for longer than in Canada, have produced mixed results, with some suggesting increased session spending among heavy users and others finding no statistically significant effect after controlling for player risk profiles.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Apple Pay in Canadian casino payments is likely to be shaped by two developments. The first is the potential expansion of Ontario’s regulated model to other provinces. British Columbia has operated PlayNow as its provincial monopoly, but there have been policy discussions about whether a competitive licensing model similar to Ontario’s could be introduced. If additional provinces open their markets to private operators, the demand for standardized, trusted payment methods — Apple Pay among them — will increase, and operators will have stronger incentives to invest in the technical integrations required to support it.
The second development is Apple’s own evolution of its payment services. Apple has been expanding its financial services footprint, including the Apple Card in the United States and various buy-now-pay-later features. If Apple were to introduce a stored-value component to Apple Pay — essentially a balance that users could load and spend — the withdrawal problem that currently limits Apple Pay’s utility in the casino context could potentially be resolved. There is no public indication that Apple is planning such a feature specifically for gambling contexts, but the broader direction of Apple’s financial services strategy suggests that the gap between Apple Pay as a deposit tool and Apple Pay as a full payment solution may narrow over time.
MobilePayCasinos has noted that Canadian players increasingly expect the same level of payment convenience from casino platforms that they receive from streaming services, food delivery apps, and retail e-commerce. Apple Pay has become a baseline expectation for a significant segment of iPhone users, and casino operators who do not offer it risk losing those players to competitors who do. This competitive pressure is likely to accelerate adoption among operators who have been slower to integrate the service, particularly as Ontario’s regulated market matures and player acquisition becomes more competitive.
The story of Apple Pay in Canadian casino payments is ultimately a story about infrastructure meeting opportunity. The technical foundation — tokenization, biometric authentication, near-instantaneous processing — was built for general commerce, but its properties turned out to be well suited to the specific demands of online gambling: speed, security, and a degree of transactional privacy. The regulatory evolution in Ontario created the legitimate commercial environment in which those properties could be fully utilized. What began as a workaround for players frustrated by card declines has become a mainstream payment channel, and its continued growth in the Canadian iGaming market reflects both the maturation of that market and the broader normalization of mobile-first financial behavior among Canadian consumers. The payment landscape will continue to evolve, but Apple Pay has already secured a durable place within it.
For example, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have all signed power purchase agreements to extend the operating lifespans of large nuclear power plants. At the same time, the tech giants are investing in Small Modular Reactors, an emerging technology with enormous potential.
If nuclear is the awkward step-child of the clean electricity family, natural gas is the unwelcome uncle who won’t leave. But that’s not stopping the tech giants. A January 2026 report in Global Energy Monitor estimates that in 2025 in the United States, over 250 gigawatts of gas-fired electricity generating plants were in development, with at least one-third slated to directly power data centers on-site.
This is an astonishing amount of electricity. To verify, I went to the source, “Global Oil and Gas Plant Tracker, January 2026” and found the following for the United States: Announced, 62.8 GW; Pre-Construction, 159.5 GW; Construction: 29.5 GW. Total, 252 GW. At 90 percent uptime, which we may expect from a baseload natural gas power plant, that equals nearly 2 million GWh per year.
Needless to say, the tech giants are also turning to wind, solar, and battery storage to power their data centers. We may criticize the subsidies that sustain these technologies, as well as their impact, but when it comes to energy, you have to pick your poison. Nothing is totally unsubsidized, and nothing is totally clean. The potential for unsubsidized solar PV electricity and batteries to compete with natural gas power is coming, even if by a full system levelized cost analysis it may not have arrived just yet. The tech giants are hedging their bets, and with billions to burn, are also investing heavily in renewables.
It doesn’t end there. The beauty of tech giants entering the energy space is not only their access to stupefying amounts of cash to pay for their projects. They also bring with them a culture of urgency. They also bring with them a culture of urgency. These companies are run by individuals who have spent their careers measuring the timeline for project launches in months. They will not accept decade long delays, and they will use all their power to adhere to the timelines to which they have become accustomed.
That brings with it unpleasant side effects that we have to manage. These data centers will have to recycle their water. They will need to blend their massive data centers into the landscape and be good neighbors to the people disrupted by these behemoths. But when it comes to energy, it is quite likely they’re going to invest so much, and stimulate so much innovation, that their onsite generators will export power to the grid instead of draining it.
The price of electricity is bound to come down. Innovation across every possible source of electricity – large and small scale nuclear, natural gas, solar, geothermal (a big wild card), novel solutions such as linear motors and other advances we can’t possibly predict – ensures that the days of grossly overpriced electricity are numbered. And that, at least that, is a very good thing.
Edward Ring is the Director of Water and Energy Policy at the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).