Toronto company eyes building AI data centre on Hamilton’s shores

Hamilton has long been an attractive location for businesses to set up shop, but a new kind of industry is looking at the steel city as a potential destination: AI data centres.

A company out of Toronto called Slate Asset Management owns 800 acres of land along Hamilton’s industrial waterfront.

They have big plans for the area including the Steelport Project, a “world-class AI, advanced manufacturing, and clean infrastructure district connecting rail, road, and water in the historic port of Hamilton,” according to the Steelport website.

“They’re looking to, their words not mine: ‘to create a new manufacturing research campus that gives new life to the former Stelco lands’ that would include public realm,” said Hamilton Ward 3 Coun. Nrinder Nann.

The company released a few renderings of what the area could look like when construction is finished.

Executive director of Environment Hamilton Ian Borsuk says he has attended meetings and information sessions about the project.

“It would be mostly used for research purposes is what we’re being told, so universities like McMaster or elsewhere, would be able to use it,” said Executive director of Environment Hamilton Ian Borsuk. “We also know because it’s on the local lands, so Slate is technically Stelco’s landlord in some ways, they would actually be using a lot of the permits that Stelco’s actually had access to.”

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Borsuk says he knows of plans for a small data centre, but that only covers some of the 800 acres of land that needs remediation.

“Right now we’re only talking about a very small portion of it and we know that if that first data centre goes through, which is relatively small, there are interests in building out something much bigger that would require significantly more electricity, would use up a lot more water, and so on and so forth,” said Borsuk.

The scope and scale of future projects is also a concern for Nann.

“It’s legitimate grounds for concern, you know, water usage — we’ve seen stories, horror stories, coming through the United States of an entire waterbody being completely drained by large-scale corporate, hyper-scale data centres,” said Nann.

For now, Environment Hamilton is confident that whatever is built here, won’t be as concerning as other much larger AI data centers proposed in Utah and Alberta, but they still have a lot of questions.

Slate Asset Management wasn’t available to speak with CHCH News Thursday.

Coun. Nann held a virtual community information session Thursday evening.

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