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FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE SPRAWL OF

AI DATA CENTRES

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It’s politely known as “the hum,” but the sound from data centres is more like a round-the-clock screeching hiss. 

That sound is one of the most immediate reasons that, across Canada, people are opposing data centres. There are a lot of other reasons: surveillance, AI companies’ goal of replacing millions of workers, climate-breaking fossil fuel emissions, violence both to women and workers in the global majority, the slop filling our feeds, planet-scale intellectual property theft, and more.  Hidden in the hum are deep consequences for our communities, our country and our humanity. 

The hum is the marketed promise, while the ear deafening screech is the reality many are facing across the country.

But Canada’s government wants to speed up data centres. A government leaked briefing prepared for federal AI Minister Evan Solomon showed that Canada’s AI data centre capacity could grow 65-fold. The federal “AI For All” strategy has 50 pages of marketing possible benefits, and one vague section on AI fuelled by renewable energy. At this moment, benefits are being professed without any regulations to protect communities or our shared land and waters. 

A growing consensus points in the other direction: slow down, and give us the time and information to understand the impacts. That’s why the Council of Canadians is calling for a Canada-wide moratorium on data centre construction, and permanent requirements that every data centre disclose the following, on an ongoing basis:

  • How much water it’s using, and what happens with the waste
  • How much power it consumes, and where that comes from
  • Where the minerals and materials for the chips and equipment come from
  • What the computational capacity is being used for 
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AI: It’s time to pause it until they prove it. Federal moratorium until regular monitoring and regulations are in place. We need to know impacts, inputs and intent.

Is the data centre fuelling warfare or entertainment? Until we can answer that question with clarity – we need a federal moratorium

Data centres are being proposed in already water-stressed regions. Until we know what they’re drinking, we need a national pause.

water

IMPACTS ON WATER

Many data centres are being proposed in already water-stressed regions, and it seems every operator insists their project is different. The claims need to be closely examined: 

Many data centres tout the use of closed-loop systems that recirculate the same fluid, and can cut water consumption by up to 70%. But these systems demand higher energy usage, and they aren’t consequence-free: leaks or spills of the corrosion inhibitors, biocides, and glycol used to keep that fluid stable can carry heavy metals at concentrations thousands of times over safe limits for surface water. Additionally, the water sitting in the warm metal pipes builds bacterial biofilm inside the system that needs to be periodically drained and treated with toxic biocides. Where will those toxic wastewaters go when flushed? 

Evaporative systems, the more common and cheaper choice, works differently — and uses more water outright. Up to 85% of the water they draw evaporates, and never returns to the water supply. What doesn’t evaporate becomes “blowdown”: water deliberately bled off because the minerals and treatment chemicals left behind become concentrated, sometimes at 3 to 5 times the level of the original water, before it’s discharged to sewers or waterways.

Most large data centre projects run on gas, and so the water impact extends far upstream to the fracking that supplies the gas itself. A single fracking well uses an average of roughly 3 to 14 million gallons of water to create the slurry injected underground; much of that returns to the surface as toxic wastewater containing heavy metals and, in some cases, radioactive material. These poisons must be permanently disposed of rather than returned to the water cycle.

Our Policy Demand

The Council of Canadians is calling for mandatory disclosure at federal and provincial levels on water source, volume withdrawn, cooling system type, and wastewater treatment method for every data centre, updated monthly and made fully public. Disclosure needs to be regular and public, not only once at approval, and never checked again.

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Climate Catastrophe

While Canada’s own “AI for all” makes the claim that the AI data centre roll out will be fuelled by renewable energy, a closer look reveals entrenched ties to the justification and continuation of fossil fuels – namely through fracking for natural gas to fuel the proposed AI data centre build out. Fracking wells release methane, which is 86 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. 

Alberta is about to host what its own backers call the largest AI data centre park on Earth — and it will run almost entirely on fossil fuels. Wonder Valley, a $70-billion project near Grande Prairie, has currently grown to 9 gigawatts of power capacity, and plans to tap directly into one of the world’s largest natural gas reserves. That’s roughly two-thirds of Alberta’s entire electricity grid at peak demand, dedicated to one company’s servers.

Saskatchewan tells a different but equally damning story: instead of building new fossil fuel capacity, it’s keeping coal-fired projects alive specifically to serve a data centre. The provincial opposition alleged that a SaskPower submission to the province’s Rate Review Panel stated plainly that the decision to keep coal-fired units at Boundary Dam running past their regulated end-of-life “allowed SaskPower to have supply available to accommodate the Bell data centre load.” SaskPower disputed that framing, but the Minister responsible also separately credited the coal decision with helping enable the Bell deal. Either way, coal that was scheduled to retire is now burning longer, for a private company’s compute needs.

Our Policy Demand

We’re calling for a federal and provincial moratorium on any new, extended, or expanded fossil-fuel generation (gas or coal) built specifically to power a data centre, and mandatory disclosure of every facility’s energy source and emissions, updated monthly and made public.

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Colonial extraction

The lands these proposed projects will sit on were never simply “available” — and yet Canada’s latest example is playing out in court right now. Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation is challenging a provincial water licence granted to the Municipal District of Greenview for the proposed $70-billion Wonder Valley AI data centre. This occurred after Alberta’s own Aboriginal Consultation Office determined that the water diversion (6 million cubic metres a year) didn’t trigger a duty to consult. The Nation had to fight in court just to find out who actually owned the project, since it was initially registered only as a numbered company. As Chief Sheldon Sunshine put it, the province has been “shepherding through their regulatory system using the municipality to evade their duties” with no environmental assessment and “next to no consultation with our nations.”

This pattern is not new. This pattern repeats what Canada has done with pipelines, mines, and hydro dams for generations: the approval passes first on Treaty and traditional territory, the affected Nation discovers the project only when it’s publicly announced, and then they are forced to spend years and legal fees just to repeatedly debate what is already enshrined by Canada’s own Constitution. 

AI data centre rollouts are just the latest technological expression for the same pattern, and reveals why “consultation” without teeth isn’t good enough: at present, a government office can simply decide, on paper, that a six-million-cubic-metre water diversion doesn’t rise to the level of requiring the duty to consult First Nations.

Our Policy Demand

We’re calling for legally binding free, prior, and informed consent under Canada’s UNDRIP Act – before any data centre or associated energy project proceeds on Treaty or traditional territory. This process must occur before data centre permits are approved at all levels of government.

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What are they building in there?

Nobody outside the company — sometimes not even the municipality approving the permit — actually knows what any given data centre’s computing power will be used for. With rising fears around surveillance, geopolitical warfare, and rapidly increasing military spending on AI, transparency has become a heightened concern for Canadians and people all over the world.

Presently, data centres are developed behind non-disclosure agreements, shell companies, and code names, to the point that in August 2026, Pennsylvania’s governor signed an executive order specifically banning state agencies from entering NDAs with data centre developers and requiring more public disclosure before projects move forward. But currently, secrecy is the norm, rather than the exception in Canada.

What we do know about how this computing capacity gets used should already give everyone pause. The same commercial cloud infrastructure running chatbots is increasingly also serving as the physical backbone for government and military AI. That same capacity also underwrites the “surveillance economy”: the tracking of consumer habits, location data, and social behaviour that feeds targeted advertising, credit scoring, and predictive policing tools. 

In the same month of this news, a Stanford-led research team used generative AI to design a synthetic virus for the first time: an organism that had never existed in nature. Biosecurity experts writing in the journal Science called it a turning point, warning that “the ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.” 

None of this requires a conspiracy — it only requires what’s already true today: a data centre’s owner has no legal obligation in Canada to disclose what its servers are actually doing. With infrastructure that is dual-use by design, the public has no way to know whether the servers in their backyards are fueling warfare or entertainment.

Our Policy Demand

We call for mandatory disclosure, mandated at the federal and provincial levels, updated monthly and made public – about all companies using the data centres, and the specific applications being hosted on each site.

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