The Data Centre Battle Will Be Won (Or Lost) in Cities - Macleans.ca
Canadians really hate data centres right now. As a climate and media researcher, I’ve been following this story for a decade, but it’s recently come to a boil. Across the country, mass grassroots opposition to these developments is surging. Hundreds of protesters flooded the streets of Vancouver this summer, decrying plans for a publicly subsidized cluster of Telus data centres. More than a thousand Albertans registered a record-breaking number of submissions to their provincial utility commission, opposing a huge, one-gigawatt Synapse development in Olds, a rural town about an hour’s drive north of Calgary. Meanwhile, in Manitoba, a 13,000-signature petition helped persuade Premier Wab Kinew to reject a data centre spearheaded by Jet.AI and Consensus Core. It would’ve occupied 141 hectares of farmland south of Winnipeg. Vigorous pushback to these projects makes sense given their resource demands. The data centres that are being built to support today’s AI boom are an order of magnitud