Excerpt:
LaRocque said the decision is baffling, citing concerns over rising electricity demand, massive water consumption and air pollution linked to AI data centres.
“Vancouver is in the middle of a housing crisis and water shortage,” he said. “These centres will use more heat and water — it seems counterintuitive to me.”
One reader wrote: The electricity demand, (WATER CONSUMPTION) and air pollution are generally not valid concerns. I, however, disagree. There was an article showing how much water they actually use for cooling per day, and it was astounding. For some reason, the article is no longer available for public viewing, or I would’ve shared the link. My simple desktop computer gets warm from use, my phone gets hot when it’s doing too much thinking. Simple comparison, but the same and BIGGER.
We already have a bunch of data centers in Vancouver. The electricity demand, water consumption and air pollution are generally not valid concerns – the current set rarely, if ever, use their diesel generators. Most of those are things like Tier1 data centers, where anyone can go in and buy rackspace to mount servers – a bunch of local companies use them, if they want more ‘sovereign’ network stacks while still having the hefty physical security controls. Having “No” datacenters at all, means putting all your data into US Cloud service providers (at the moment at least, for the most part). I doubt “AI” datacenters are all that different than regular datacenters, unless someone knows different and can clue me in? I’m fairly sure the push to build more “Canadian company owned” datacenters is part of trying to build more ‘sovereign’ tech stacks in Canada, though it’s a bizarre step since DCs have existed for a long time in Canada – it’s the software that’s the bigger issue in general.
The better arguments, I’d say, are that the Job creation estimates look misleading, and that the real estate cost in Vancouver makes it a silly location for multiple new projects of this sort. In terms of job creation, the current data centers in Vancouver do not have a ton of staff at all – they’re generally built like mini-fortresses, with K-Rated fences (enough to stop a semi-truck goin like 100km/h), biometric entry points, mantraps, tons of physical security features… but in terms of actual staff, there’s like maybe 10-30 per site. There are security guards that’re on site 24/7, though it’s usually a relatively small team supported by cameras etc, working out of one primary security office near the main entry point. There are electricians/sparkies, but they usually work at numerous sites since you don’t have constant demand for ‘new’ installations. There’re a couple manager sorts to meet potential clients and do general overhead junk, and a couple to provide ‘remote hands’ troubleshooting if customers need it. Pretending like you’re going to create 525 permanent jobs is a generous estimate – it’s also a piddly number for the investment of public money.
Datacenters are also typically just space/power, with companies needing to install their own compute hardware. Access to those systems is virtual, with the specific physical location not meaning much. Assuming most major cities in BC have decent power availability, and decent telecommunications infrastructure, it makes more sense to build these things in other communities with lower land cost. Even just pushing the vancouver DC’s out towards the valley, or up the coast a ways, would make more sense.
With high-density computing, like the data centers that run artificial intelligence, comes immense heat that cannot be cooled with a conventional air-cooling system.
The typical cabinet loads have doubled and tripled with the deployment of AI. An air-cooling system simply cannot capture the heat generated by the high KW/cabinet loads generated by AI cabinet clusters.
Water cooling can be done in a smaller space with less power, but it requires enormous amount of water. A recent study determined that a single hyper-scaled facility would need 1.5 million liters of water per day to provide cooling and humidification.
AI is typically deployed in 20-30 cabinet clusters at or above 40 KW per cabinet. This represents a fourfold increase in KW/cabinet with the deployment of AI. The difference is staggering.
A typical Chat-GPT query uses about 10 times more energy than a Google search – and that’s just for a basic generative AI function. More advanced queries require substantially more power
Hm, interesting – though them requiring specific server setups to take advantage of the water-based cooling systems in the datacenter makes me pause a bit. I’ve seen what I imagine are those sorts of rigs at the DC I use for work, typically in segregated areas of the datacenter. Building a DC with that capability though, doesn’t necessarily equate to having customers to fill the racks.
Air pollution’s a new one, how do AI data centers generate air pollution?
If they can’t get enough grid power, they rely on onsite generators.
Facedeer is a well-known AI evangelist troll. He only asks to waste time.
Well-known to you, perhaps, given you follow me around and obsess about me.
Are these, though? The article had no details.
There are no details because the companies won’t share them, and the government won’t ask for them until after they are built.
In order for data centres to deliver on their promise to provide virtually continuous service, they must be able to operate under any circumstances. This means ensuring they have redundant backup power requirements to weather blackouts or any other power interruption.
Backup power for these facilities almost always means diesel generators — sometimes hundreds of them. For a 100-megawatt facility like the one proposed in downtown Vancouver, this could mean anywhere between 25 and 50 diesel generators on site, depending on their size. Diesel generators are notoriously dirty, emitting fine particulate matter associated with a host of health and breathing problems. It’s why diesel generation is often strictly regulated.
However, as electricity grids strain under demands, the pressure to switch to diesel generation at the slightest hint of a potential energy disruption has been growing. Placing that many generators directly in the middle of the urban core could be a major public health issue. Due to these challenges, the state of Virginia — home to the largest concentration of data centres in the world — concluded that the “industrial scale of data centres makes them largely incompatible with residential uses.”
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/05/18/Vancouver-Getting-AI-Data-Centres/
The power goes out in downtown Vancouver about as often as I visit, which is to say once every handful of years. Any sort of diesel generator usage on that scale is not even worth mentioning in terms of air pollution while cars are still allowed in the city core.
BC doesn’t have strained electrical grids in cities, this ain’t Texas.
In BC, absolutely not. They will be powered by BC Hydro just like everything else. This is simply just a bunch of Fear Mongering.
