The City of Hamilton is moving to temporarily ban artificial intelligence data centres from being built within its boundaries, in a pre-emptive step that reflects growing unease over the rapid spread of the power-hungry facilities. City council voted 15 to 1 earlier this week to draft a bylaw that would put the prohibition in place while the issue is studied further.
What makes the move notable is that there are currently no proposals on the table to build any of these large facilities in Hamilton. The council is acting ahead of any formal application, seeking to set the rules before developers arrive rather than scrambling to respond once a project has already been put forward for approval.
Councillor Cameron Kretsch said there is pressure from the federal government to be ready for such developments. He explained that he voted in favour of the motion because of concerns raised by local residents, who have grown increasingly wary of the prospect of a major data centre being built in their community without clear oversight.
Kretsch described a confusing landscape in which municipalities are being asked to prepare for projects they cannot yet see. People are all scrambling to meet federal deadlines, he said, but the city has no access to that information. The applications do not come to the municipality, none has been submitted, and as a result officials are, in his words, working with nothing.
Opposition to data centres has become an emerging and bubbling policy issue across the country. Critics point to the enormous amount of water and energy the facilities consume to operate, the pollution they could emit, and the vast physical footprints they occupy in the communities that host them, all of which feed local resistance.
The scale of the energy question is striking. A research report found that global data centres used an estimated 448 terawatt hours of electricity last year. If they were treated as a single nation, that consumption would make the world's data centres collectively the eleventh largest electricity consumer on the planet, underscoring why the debate over new facilities has become so charged.
Not everyone sees the facilities as a threat. A researcher named Vu, with a Toronto Metropolitan University public policy think tank, argued that being at the forefront of building data centres can catalyse significant economic growth and academic research. He believes the Toronto area and Ontario as a whole have the excess capacity in energy and water to support them, and said much of the pushback is rooted in broader negative feelings toward the AI industry, with the onus falling on developers and governments to demonstrate a real benefit to residents.