Of course they should be opposed. Even today nobody can articulate the benefits of alternative intelligence. This is just another version of risky kool-aid being passed around. The only goal is making you dependent and getting your hard-earned dollar. Fuck that particular brand of bullshit.
But, but something something singularity ??? We will ALl bENefittE !
It’s a genie that can grant any wish
-Sam Altman
What a fucking wanker. Somehow, everyone in charge of everything is too stupid and too corrupt to call shenanigans on this shit.
Plus, genies usually fuck you over when you make your wish; they don’t work like the DIsney Genie.
Especially if those data centres run on fossil fuels (methane, diesel, etc).
ITT: people who don’t know how the medical system stores and securely shares health data between hospitals.
That’s not what AI data centers are for… I’d agree to a normal “data storage” style data center that doesn’t consume exorbitant amount of power and cooling.
Given the amount of XP based hardware and passwords on postit notes, I just assumed that nothing was stored or shared securely.
Government “So you want some AI data centres?”
No goverment has ever cared about “the majority of their citizens” when the people on top prefer else wise.
No one cares. Doug Ford has been paid, and Brookfield makes datacentres.
Majority of Canadians can’t think critically.
I know the anti-AI crowd doesn’t want to hear anything about “facts”, but AI datacenters do not actually use that much energy compared to other industries, they don’t particularly harm the environment compared to other industries, and they aren’t causing water issues in Canada because we aren’t building them in deserts like the stupid Americans.
The numbers sound big when “GIGAWATT DATACENTER” is being broadcast in the news, However, in the scale of other industries it’s pretty reasonable considering we don’t need one in every city or anything. Two or three in the entire country maybe. The demand for AI isn’t infinite, and the efficiency is getting better fairly rapidly right now.
For context, we built the Kemano Generating Station (A dam near Kitimat) to produce almost 900 MW of power to be used almost exclusively for smelting aluminum, and it’s still used for that purpose. 50% of the current generation capacity in BC goes to mining, foresty, and oil/gas accounting for something like 7-8 GW of total power in BC alone.
In Alberta, 75% of electricity produced goes to Industry, which results in an even larger total usage than BC.
BC Hydro has already implemented regulations to restrict AI datacenters to 300MW of new capacity per year to keep things stable based on them building capacity, so if anything it will likely keep energy prices down for consumers because of the stable growth and predictability. BC hydro completed purchasing agreements for an additional 8 Gigawatts of Wind and Solar at 7.4 cents per KWH to start coming online at the beginning of the 2030s.
Not sure why they think there’s going to be a ton of environmental harm, BC has one of the cleanest energy grids in the world and we’re not adding new fossil fuel plants or anything at this point. They are extending some existing ones, but it’s literally two plants. Alberta’s new Meta datacenter is going to burn Natural gas that would otherwise be exported to be burned to power datacenters elsewhere, which just saves on needing pipeline capacity for that export.
Water use is another bullshit argument, again, we aren’t building these datacenters in a desert. The two proposed datacenters in BC that everyone is yelling about, and the Gigawatt Meta datacenter in Alberta aren’t even the type that uses water evaporative cooling, so they will have no impact on water consumption. Our climate here in Canada doesn’t require evaporative water cooling as the only option, we can build them with closed systems and the companies are already picking those options because they don’t want to piss people off.
"I know the anti-AI crowd doesn’t want to hear anything about “facts” - you sound like you’re actually looking for trouble.
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.
the anti-AI crowd doesn’t want to hear anything about “facts”: that is not education in any way. Very bad start.
Yea, except you clearly didn’t read past it where I provided facts. Which lumps you into the “I don’t care about facts” group. You reacted purely off emotion.
Not sure why they think there’s going to be a ton of environmental harm
The center proposed for Hamilton with have a constant drone, strain the power grid and dump massive amounts hot water into lake Ontario, which will promote toxic growth in the source of drinking water for 6 million.
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.
Thanks Ontario PC intern, so to summarize your research:
Hamilton is fucked environmentally anyway, so more can’t hurt.
Dumping 400 megawatts of heat 24/7 into a inlet of lake should be encouraged, because others do it.
The grid is fine is we just crank up more gas plants around the area, now 24/7.
You don’t live here, so fuck the city of Hamilton.
If you’re Hamiltonian, is it true that Horwath did not oppose it?
Yep, she and several councilors approved it. Horwath was in in severe financial trouble personally. I suspect her troubles are now gone.
She has been a pretty useless Mayor, this is just one example.
This area was intended to be reclaimed for parklands and community space given the retraction of industry from Stelco, but now it will be revitalized with 6-8 long term jobs!
Goddamn. I mean, I’m not gonna deride a neighbour in need for taking money. Just hits a bit different when it’s a former ONDP leader.
but AI datacenters do not actually use that much energy compared to other industries,
To counter that statement:
The state that made itself America’s data center capital just realized the data centers want more electricity than five entire Texases could ever produce. Less than a year ago, Governor Greg Abbott declared Texas the epicenter of AI development. On August 3, 2026, he froze all new data center power connections to the Texas grid and called for a full audit of every project in the queue. The reason was a number so large it barely feels real. ERCOT is currently tracking more than 1,800 projects in the queue, representing over 474 gigawatts of electricity, or more than five times the grid’s record for peak demand. Approximately 90 percent of the new power requests are data centers. To put that in perspective, Texas set its all-time electricity demand record in August 2023 at approximately 85.5 gigawatts, during one of the most brutal heat waves in state history.
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.
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.
Too bad it’s still a huge waste of the earths natural resources to produce fascist slop.
Which resources exactly?
The amount of physical resources used by AI is hilariously small. These chips are fucking tiny. The largest metal use is the heat spreader, which is just a chunk of aluminum that could be instantly recycled. The “special” metals they use up take less than a gram total per card. All of it is recyclable if those resources become difficult to extract naturally for some reason.
Your take on AI being used to produce fascist slop is amusing, but irrelevant. You could ban every datacenter in Canada and the US, and AI would still be used by bad people to hurt you. I can run lighter models on any computer at this point, and top of the line models like Kimi K3 can be run on a set up that costs less than a car. You can’t stop that short of turning off the internet entirely.
The correct method to addressing the issue of fascist slop isn’t stopping AI from being built, it’s to change the situation in which that is possible. Fascism has existed for all of human history. Education is the correct method to stop it spreading.
Are you brainwashed, or simply brain dead?
The amount of resources is huge. We’re not just talking about electricity. We’re talking agricultural farm land that’s being bought up in huge swaths to build these data centers. We’re talking building materials. We’re talking all the raw materials needed to build the computer parts themselves. They’re phenominally huge.
And the fascist slop they’re talking about is how the largest service providers of AI are manipulating their models to give false information, and even twist it to reflect a certain pro-capitalism and pro-fascist narrative. We’re not talking about some dude creating a model for whatever malicious intent for personal use. We’re talking models being used by the greater public, consuming the information they are given as fact, when in fact that information is manipulated to skew public opinion.
Also, for the record, when people are talking about “AI”, they’re talking about ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Gemini, Claude, etc. The major service providers.
Otherwise AI is a godsend for many fields, including science and medicine and other kinds of important research. It should never have been created by stealing copyrighted material, by going through Reddit and Twitter archives full of memes, bullshit, sarcasm and lies and then made accessible to the greater public.
But now these companies are trying to commodify intelligence and they’re using their billions to influence governments to force this shit on everyone.
I never needed AI in my life. And the little I have used it, gave me godawful results. And in the meantime, the data centers running all this are wreaking ecological havoc.
Otherwise AI is a godsend for many fields, including science and medicine and other kinds of important research.
That’s debatable. There has not been a breakthrough using this technology yet and I have yet to see it as transformational in biomedical research, even though I published three papers now based on AI tools.
Having AI tools in biomedical research is utterly pointless when the US killed most research when Trump killed the NIH, and that spending was 80% of the world’s spending in diseases research and other countries have done nothing to fill that gap.
The concept that AI will quickly produce a safe, effective drug that works for any disease is pure science fiction.
The Nobel committee for Chemistry disagrees with you.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/
That was for a protein modeling tool, not any discovery or treatment of disease.
Enjoy your Koolaid, because summers are only getting hotter.
Did you even read the quote you responded to?
Otherwise AI is a godsend for many fields, including science and medicine and other kinds of important research.
and your response started with
That’s debatable. There has not been a breakthrough using this technology yet
Last I checked, Chemistry is a science.
You’re now trying to shift the goalposts.
Global warming is a huge issue, but stopping AI will not materially affect that when we haven’t solved the problems that are ACTUALLY causing global warming.
Again, I really don’t think you get the scale of things here. Do some math before you spout off.
Datacenter land isn’t even a rounding error in the amount of farmland we have. “Huge swaths” for a mega datacenter means a number measured in hundreds of acres. Alberta alone has 50 million farm acres. Lets go crazy with the numbers and say that every mega datacenter is 1000 acres they wanted to build 10 of the things (There aren’t even 10 total planned in the world right now, so that’s not happening). That’s 5000 acres, or 0.01% of the farmland in Alberta.
That is not even worth discussing.
As for your fascist slop arguments, that’s just patently stupid unless you also put humans in the same category. You (through both traditional and social media) are being fed intentional bullshit continuously. You can get the AI to say or do pretty much anything you want, asking it for a recipe with some ingredients in your fridge isn’t going to be pushing some sort of pro-Israel standpoint into your response. It’s no worse than the textbooks we use at a schools in terms of how it approaches certain topics. The only real exception to that is some of the Chinese models refusing to say negative things about the Chinese government, and that’s a well known factor that can be accounted for. This is not a conspiracy against you, it’s ridiculously easy to test for bias in AI and then account for it in your use.
The thing people don’t realize about AI (when they’re referring to ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, etc.) is that basic chat with these models are not what the datacenters are for. We already have enough capacity for your average person to ask them recipe questions and to come up with wording for a birthday card. These datacenters are for the business uses of AI in harnesses looping to complete complex tasks, especially in programming.
Nobody is forcing you to use it personally. I don’t understand this argument.
Businesses WILL use it to make more money because it is beneficial. You could try to avoid buying products and services from companies that use it, but you likely don’t have any choice in that matter since it’s being used almost everywhere already. Even if they aren’t using it to respond to customer emails or answer the phone they’re likely using it in their planning, documentation, or even integrated into their accounting software because it saves them money. Businesses are saving money with AI, even if it’s not some sort of miracle multiplier for everyone.
These datacenters are for the business uses of AI in harnesses looping to complete complex tasks, especially in programming.
You want me to share specific examples of people doing bad things with literally every single thing humans have ever invented?
The “sharing” of that image was done using the internet, likely on cellular phones, connected to radio systems, that utilize electricity. Yet it’s somehow’ only AI’s fault that it happened? Like people haven’t been using photoshop to make fake images before that.
You have no excuse for being this ignorant.
Enlighten me. Comments with no support or sources are completely unhelpful.
Use ChatGPT and figure it out.
I dumped the whole context into ChatGPT and asked it to figure out which parts of the conversation were accurate, and it agreed with my arguments and linked a bunch of sources that provide source statistics supporting that.
What next?
The problem is that they consume resources and produce almost nothing useful. It’s the same as throwing those resources away.
If we were instead building out data centers, at the same cost and of the same capacity, for the purpose of moving Canadian government data out of the US-multinational-owned cloud and back within our borders, I would support it. It’s the waste, and the likelihood that the market will crash and take even the dubious benefit of $$ for building these with it, that causes me to be against building these particular data centers.
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.
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.
I disagree. It’s an economic bubble: The value of these companies is being vastly inflated by a collective delusion. Those tulip bulbs were worth one heck of a lot . . . until suddenly they weren’t.
I’m not talking about their value. I’m talking about companies purchasing their services, which is why I used the term Revenue and not “valuation”.
The problem is the massive environmental impact of running these centres, not who runs them.
It’s just not that massive, see my other comments. People keep failing to consider the scope of the world when seeing big numbers. The world is huge, industry in general is huge, and AI is a small fish in a very large pond when it comes to resource consumption.
It’s just not that massive, see my other comments.
your other comments are wrong and have been corrected by others. Sorry bud, not buying your bullshit here.
Not a single person has posted evidence that AI uses up a massive amount of resources in the global or industrial context. Even the person who suggested that all currently proposed AI datacenters for all of Canada could use up to 8% of current electricity just proved that it is in fact a small number compared to our total energy use.
he paid revenue for these companies wouldn’t still be increasing so rapidly
Is that why they’re all sucking up to Trump and asking for so much subsidies to survive?
Americans are effectively subsidizing these companies via their tax dollars by the billions.
These companies are also losing billions. So I don’t where where you got that idea.
That first example specifically refers to how fast revenue is increasing.
Companies are going to try to lobby to save money any time they can, that’s how business and lobbying works. If they don’t get it, they aren’t going to stop, they will just use the next best option.
If you don’t want your government to subsidize industries that don’t actually need it, maybe you shouldn’t have voted in Trump.
That isn’t the technology that’s at fault.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bakx-york-ai-data-centres-alberta-solomon-9.7222388
The research shows the rapid growth in the sector; active data centres have a combined capacity of 1.6 gigawatts, while all of the proposed projects would inflate that number to 13.2 gigawatts.
13GW is like 8-9% of Canada’s generation capacity. Prolly gonna be concentrated regionally so maybe even higher proportion of local generation. This cannot, not have impact on prices given that we’re not installing new generating capacity quickly at all (thank you Doug Ford in Ontario), and what we’ve seen elsewhere, we’re gonna pay higher rates and since electricity is an input to almost everything else, like oil, we’re bound to see higher inflation. I don’t want inflation and we’re not capable of planning industrial development so that we install the generating capacity first, then build damn the DCs, so I don’t want them. I don’t trust the industry and the investors behind it, and I don’t want to pay for it. At this point in time - fuck 'em. Once the current bubble has burst, I’d reevaluate. Right now it’s full of heavily invested and indebted liars, psychopaths and other grifters, none of which bodes well for a sane picture of the industry.
I do run local AI btw.
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:
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.
Good regardless of DCs. If and when they have the capacity, and places where DCs can pollute without harming people, there would naturally be a lot less opposition.
Not 300m away from the nearest row of houses.
That’s right by highways 401 & 407 so it’s likely noisy there already. I don’t know enough if that is a good location or not but that looks like suburban sprawl style development.
Ontario has greenbelts. BC has Agriculture Land Reserves to preserve farmland for agriculture purposes.
Found it - lemmy.ca/post/63312400. This is the pic they don’t show in the articles.
Here’s a bit of a zoom out of the situation in case it looks like it’s just one row of houses:
Aaadn FUCK ME, just as I was doing that, I realized that’s ANOTHER DC on Argentia Rd. The one that got shutdown in Mississauga is here:
The one in Etobicoke is still under review. Seems like the people from the hood are pestering the city about it.
The map doesn’t show it well but there’s residential neighbourhood very close to it. I posted abt it sometime ago but couldn’t dig up the pic. Highway noise is bad but it doesn’t do the subsonic 24/7 noise as far as I know.
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.
100%
One could do solar and wind quicker but we can’t, because we don’t have any semblance of planning in our economy. So if they build the DCs now it’ll happen on market principles, which means competition for exisring electricity supply with poorer customers - all of us, as well as portable gas turbines where the grid has no capacity or the price is too high.
Ontario built a lot of wind power with Samsung, in a deal that angered everyone. Both Liberals and PCs have been blocking wind farms in Lake Ontario which resulted in a huge lawsuit and revelations that our government destroyed evidence proving they did this.
But hey, sucker taxpayers pay lawsuits, not political parties.
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.
That Hamilton site is fed by gas plants in Nanticoke, so any grid strain will be addressed by massive gas burning 24/7, great for Enbridge and politicians friendly with Enbridge.
In regulation development conversations it’s the industry’s lobby talking to our gov’t. Experience shows we tend to lose. In the “should we build” conversations, it’s much easier for us to express our binary desire and for surveys to capute and relay to our gov’t. We tend to win more often. It’s much easier to sling loophole-ridden regulation as “we fulfilled people’s desires for regulation” than let DC builds go ahead when most of us don’t want them. So we scream no DCs to anyone and everyone. We use the tools we’re given.
I personally would much prefer to live in a situation where private capital is subsurvient to the state abd therefore democratically enacted regulation does what we want it to do and punishes capital when it oversteps. But that’s not our status quo and we can’t feasibly change it for at least another 4-5 years, prolly more like 10+. So I scream no DCs to whoever would listen.
