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The proposed data centre would take up abou three square kilometres on Hamiltons harbourfront. Residents worry it would put a strain on neighbourhoods that already bear the brunt of the city's industrial burden. Nick Iwanyshyn/The Canadian Press
A proposed pause on new power-hungry data centres in Hamilton cleared a hurdle on Tuesday, the latest step in a growing pushback to Canada’s buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
A planning committee voted to send the proposed moratorium plan to Hamilton’s city council for a vote at a later date. The motion brought by Coun. Nrinder Nann would ask staff to draft a moratorium, framing it as a chance to give the city time to study data centre impacts and develop a framework to guide their future development.
At Tuesday’s committee meeting, dozens of residents spoke favourably of a moratorium.
“When decisions of this magnitude are to be made – decisions that disrupt electric grids, pollute the water and air, that reshape neighbourhoods – what role should the people that live there and the people chosen to represent them have? That’s the question that’s in front of you today,” said Nick Tsergas, a Hamilton health journalist who started a website to inform the local data centre pushback.
“If we get it right, cities across Canada will have a blueprint to follow. If we get it wrong, they will inherit our mistake.”
Hamilton has emerged as a battleground in Canada’s debate over the future AI infrastructure. A sprawling data centre campus proposal on the harbourfront, an area long shaped by the city’s steel industry, has sparked fierce pushback from local residents at a time when the federal government is pushing an AI strategy supportive of the sector.
A private investment firm is behind the Hamilton plan to redevelop about three square kilometres of the harbourfront as a “digital and industrial” hub called Steelport. Slate Asset Management’s proposal to carve out about a quarter of that land to advance a possible data centre campus was denied by a city committee earlier this month after hundreds of Hamiltonians spoke out against it.
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Residents who spoke Tuesday said they worried large data centres could strain the electricity grid and drive up utility bills. Some said they would never back data centres running AI models that threaten jobs and are built on the work of artists and creators without their permission. Others feared round-the-clock noise, water pollution and heat radiating from a data centre would be most felt by neighbourhoods already bearing a disproportionate share of Hamilton’s industrial burden.
Anne Pasek, a Trent University researcher who spoke in favour of Tuesday’s motion, said a moratorium in Hamilton would be “groundbreaking.”
“To the best of my knowledge, they would be the first in Canada to issue a moratorium and pledge to have a sort of city-determined set of regulatory frameworks for this kind of infrastructure,” said Pasek, an associate professor who studies the climate impacts of the tech industry, in an interview.
She said a future municipal data centre framework could enforce updated noise and water pollution standards and ensure energy demands are kept in check.
“Part of the reason why data centres have been so wildly unpopular is because of a lack of transparency from the industry and a lack of clarity from regulatory bodies. Cities, I believe, are really uniquely positioned to help close that democratic gap and put this conversation on better footing,” she told the committee.
The motion approved Tuesday does not put a timeline on a moratorium or exempt data centres of a given size. The vast majority of the more than 200 written submissions to the committee supported the plan.
As residents asked councillors to hit pause, the developer behind the proposed harbourfront data centre campus told the city to work with “urgency to capture this generational opportunity.”
Slate’s written submission said its Steelport hub could reuse the site’s legacy energy infrastructure and says its location in Canada’s large population centre would ensure low latency transfer times to possible clients including universities and financial industries. A federally funded non-profit that supports the compute demands of university researchers has expressed interest in joining a portion of the proposed data centre campus.
“It is not an exaggeration to state that Hamilton risks losing a strategic opportunity to be at the forefront of the next major Canadian industry – and demonstrating to the country how data centres can be developed responsibly and to the benefit of the surrounding community,” read Slate’s submission, signed by the firms’ managing director and vice-president.
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