These centres are not for data storage. Legally, my research on human subjects data cannot leave Canada, but we can store the data locally easily.

"produce almost nothing useful" is a naive take on this situation.

Clearly they're producing something useful, otherwise the paid revenue for these companies wouldn't still be increasing so rapidly despite the price increases they're pushing out. Their revenue may not be near the investment at this point, but Amazon lost money for a decade while it got established too. Even if the big companies all stopped training new models tomorrow and laid off all their researchers, there would still be demand for running those existing models.

Besides, what's the loss to Canada if we build a few massive datacenters and then the companies that are using them go belly up? It's not the government building the datacenters, the companies would take a loss and sell them off to someone else to use at a discount. That's happened before, and sparked entirely new innovation due to a glut of cheap specialized resources becoming available.

Canada is thankfully not Texas and is not proposing hundreds of large data centers in dry arid water stressed climate zones. A reason there are so many proposals for datacenters in the desert is to be able to use evaporative cooling which is not applicable in our situation.

The fun part of that entire statement is the word "Queue." Lots of projects WANT to be approved because they will make money. That's how investing works. Are they all going to be approved? Nope. Obviously there isn't enough power available, but there aren't even enough chips to put into that many factories if they were to get approved, Nvidia is only producing about 16-18GW worth of chips per year globally.

As for energy use, one clarification, you're confusing "Energy" and "Electricity" and those two things are not the same. Electricity is only one part of Energy. The vast majority of energy use in the state is not as electricity, it's fossil fuels burned directly in industrial processes and in transportation (and specifically excluding the fossil fuels used in power plants). Direct use makes up around 70% of total use, with electricity only making up the remaining 30%. It's worth keeping that in mind when discussing the global scale of AI.

I'm looking to educate people, unfortunately a lot of them have already made up their mind and even providing facts and sources doesn't seem to matter.

If you're Hamiltonian, is it true that Horwath did not oppose it?

The center proposed for Hamilton with have a constant drone

If it's the one I think it is, it's literally being proposed for a former steel mill site. I don't know if you know anything about steel making plants, but they're fucking loud.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/arcelormittal-dofasco-mecp-application-9.7108938 Here's an active situation IN Hamilton regarding steel mill noise and pollution.

There is a reason why we don't zone residential properties next to heavy industrial. This isn't an exception it's just the status quo.

I don't know why you think there is "strain" on the grid. These projects are approved for energy use by the government and IESO just like any other major industrial energy user. They don't just get to show up one day and start stealing everyone's power. If the grid was at risk, they wouldn't be approved.

As for the water cooling using Bay water rejection, that's may or may not be valid. I don't know much about that since it doesn't apply where I live. I would highly suggest you look at the real numbers though, it's likely such a small amount of heat that it actually doesn't matter. The Pickering Nuclear plant for example already rejects about 4000MW into Lake Ontario continuously. The steel mill datacenter is expected to be around 400MW.

Change the regulations to require air rejection instead if that's actually a problem.

That's a very informative CBC news article data data centres in Canada.

96 proposed hyperscaler DCs is excessive. Especially for water stressed regions like Alberta.

I believe we do need some more DCs for Canada's own sovereign needs. With appropriate care for noise impact and power/water usage to avoid causing undue problems. AI is a bubble but there is a demand for it so better to use Canadian AI (cohere.com) hosted in Canadian DCs.

lemmy.ca itself is hosted in an East Vancouver data centre:

https://lemmy.ca/post/37453471

given that we’re not installing new generating capacity quickly at all

You cannot install new generating capacity quickly. New SMR reactors will be online by 2030. Even gas plants can take a decade. The real waste of datacentres is that by the time they are built, the fake industry behind them will be gone.

There's a big news release today about an additional 14GW of clean electricity projects for Eastern Canada:

https://lemmy.ca/post/69504197

So Quebec looks like a good place for many new data centres with cheap and clean power.

That's already solved by only approving a specific amount of AI datacenter capacity per year, based on how the grid can be grown. BC is already doing this.

It's not a reason to prevent AI datacenters entirely it's just a reason to regulate them properly. If your government won't regulate them, and you don't change your government, then it doesn't really matter anyways.