Hamilton to vote on pausing new data centres

The City of Hamilton will be voting Wednesday on a moratorium that could put a pause on any new potential AI data centres.

In May, a Toronto-based company that owns 800 acres of land along Hamilton’s industrial waterfront proposed the development of an AI data centre.

However, the project has since been met with community protests.

At a meeting on Tuesday, city councillors heard from experts including professors from the University of Waterloo and McMaster University.

Mayor Andrea Horwath says the intention of this meeting was to gather information from experts on what an AI data centre could mean for the city.

“No decisions were made whatsoever, it was simply about education,” Horwath says.

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“Data centres in some sense are really just computers that are far away and still delivering a service to you. That could be one powerful computer, it could be millions of computers, that are housed in a dedicated facility and have cooling power. It’s a large scale housing facility for computers,” says Dr. Martin Karsten, a professor at the University of Waterloo.

Major concerns surrounding AI data centres include environmental impacts, such as water and noise pollution as well as potential job losses.

“I’m not totally against technology or progress. I just don’t like the greed behind it,” a meeting attendee says.

McMaster University also presented and say a small AI facility could act as a digital super lab for the hospital.

“I think the most important thing is that we are listening to the concerns that people are raising and in fact a number of the questions that the public has been raising on this topic especially around concerns about impacts were responded to today,” Horwath says.

On Wednesday, this topic will be up for debate at city hall in a vote to potentially ban data centres from entering the City of Hamilton.

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