Special to Ontario Construction News
Hamilton’s committee of adjustment has voted unanimously to deny a land severance application that would potentially accommodate a “hyperscale and enterprise” AI data centre campus on former Stelco waterfront steelworks lands.
The decision followed a meeting on June 4 where the committee heard from more than 70 speakers and reviewed 1,688 public submissions opposing the plan, possibly a record volume for a single agenda item according to city staff.
Hundreds of protesters also rallied outside the meeting at Hamilton City Hall to oppose the campus, raising environmental concerns about noise, land use, impacts on the water supply, and high electricity consumption.
“In a lot of years, I’ve never seen that kind of outcome from the public,” committee member Robert Reid said after the day-long meeting.
Slate Asset Management proposed an AI data centre on an 88-hectare portion of the 324-hectare (800 acre) Steelport waterfront development. Partnered with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, the company has applied for federal AI Sovereign Compute funding.
In its application, Slate said data centres are one possible use on the smaller plot of land, adding that they would use existing infrastructure at the former steel mill site to prevent impact on the area’s electricity grid and could cool the centre with water from the Hamilton Harbour bay. Toronto-based Slate has acquired and is developing the former Stelco lands into a hub known as Steelport.
AI adoption has spurred development of large-scale data centres that store volumes of data needed to run massive computations, along with an accompanying surge in investment and jobs. More than 300 traditional data centres operate in Canada, mostly located in or near major metropolitan areas. Canada has five hyperscale data centres and another 96 are in development.
Because they require far more land, electricity and water for cooling systems than traditional data centres, the push for large-scale AI centres has elicited protests in centres across Canada and the United States along with calls for a moratorium on new data centre development.
And on the day that opponents were voicing objections at the Hamilton meeting the Carney government was announcing an AI plan for a buildout of large-scale AI data centres to dramatically increase the country’s computing capacity by 2030.
As part of its strategy the Liberal government in Ottawa issued an open call for applications to develop large-scale data centres.
