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There is no question that the political landscape upon which the data centre industry conducts its business has undergone a massive sea change over the past year. It was only a short time ago that data centre developers could expect communities to shower them with promises of tax concessions, subsidies and regulatory relief in a desperate bid to attract them to their towns and cities. Fast forward to today and it is now the data centre developers that promise to shower host communities with gifts as they confront ardent opposition across Canada and the United States.
Communities across both countries are calling on their governments to enact increased regulations and even moratoriums on new builds in order to exercise a modicum of democratic control over the industry. Recognizing that public opposition is now the number one constraint on their continued expansion, data centre developers have resorted to public promises to better protect the public from the economic and environmental costs of their facilities as well as promising increased transparency in a bid to soothe public anger.
But you would be naive to think that the data centre industry is about to leave its fate in the hands of the public. Instead, we are beginning to notice a disturbing trend that sees data centre development—often in collusion with local governments—increasingly shielded from public scrutiny and democratic contestation.
Data centre developers are already notorious for the levels of secrecy they demand of local governments and the scarce amounts of information they make available for public deliberation. This has frustrated citizen groups who quite rightly ask how they are supposed to make democratic decisions on these proposals when they are often operating entirely in the dark in regards to the economic and environmental impacts of such facilities.
The industry has also lobbied heavily to prevent the introduction of rules or regulations that might constrain its activities, regardless of how publicly popular those constraints would be. The industry is also not adverse to outright buying political influence by showering sympathetic politicians with campaign contributions. Suffice it to say, data centre development has not been an ideal exercise in democracy at the best of times. However, recent data centre proposals seem to strain to meet even these lowly democratic standards.
In Regina, the time between the official public announcement of Bell’s 300 MW data centre proposal to final approval was a mere 90 days. Touted as Canada’s largest data centre and one of the largest investments in the province’s history, Bell’s proposed facility—that would consume the equivalent amount of energy of the entire city of Regina—was shepherded through the approval process. Despite the proposed scale of the project, it was not subjected to a provincial Environmental Impact Assessment. Asked about the speed of approval for a project of this size, municipal politics experts agreed that it was “practically unheard of.” University of Winnipeg’s Aaron Moore further cautioned that “it just seems impossible to me to vet something like that in the amount of time that was given.”
This trend of fast-tracking data centre proposals is not exclusive to Saskatchewan. Alberta also appears to be waiving environmental assessments for some of its proposed data centres, while in the United States, federal environmental reviews of data centre projects have all but disappeared under the Trump administration. Conveniently, the removal of these regulatory hurdles also serves to remove opportunities for the public to learn about these projects and participate in deliberations. There is a growing sense that data centre developers and sympathetic governments are working behind-the-scenes to quietly advance the approval process far enough to ensure that the time provided for actual public deliberation and contestation of these projects is limited.
“A race to build AI data centers before the public can protest,” as one headline put it. Certainly that has been the experience of the residents of Lorneville, New Brunswick, who learned that their government had known about and facilitated the development of a proposed AI data centre for a full year before informing the public. Residents of a Michigan community who were successfully sued into submission to allow a data centre expressed similar sentiments, “I think the plan was to move as fast as possible—so by the time anyone challenged it, they could say it was too far along to stop,” said one resident.
The fact that developers and governments resort to these tactics demonstrates the power that concerted community organizing has exacted on the data centre issue over the past year. Should communities continue to effectively use democratic mechanisms to win victories like moratoriums over future builds, expect to see the industry and sympathetic governments work to limit those democratic mechanisms even further. Indeed, we are already seeing governments engage in all sorts of political chicanery in data centre debates that will only serve to undermine the democratic legitimacy of these projects in the long run.
While we should certainly celebrate the victories won through community organization and democratic mobilization, we should also see the data centre debate as a stepping stone to broader concerns with the state of democracy in our country. As other commentators have pointed out, in many ways data centres act as a proxy for larger debates over Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impacts on society. Many feel that AI has been forced upon us with little if any choice. We have been asked to accept as inevitable a supposedly world-changing technology that will shatter the economic stability of millions with little question.
As the most material manifestation of AI, data centres offer the one space where people can actually exercise some modicum of democratic control over this technology. Yet we should not lose sight that it is often the wider anxieties of AI that fuel data centre opposition. Making the case that data centres provide the means to create and sustain what many fear is a profoundly anti-democratic technology controlled by an ultra-wealthy elite can allow us to connect data centre opposition with wider issues of inequality, corporate power and what real democratic control over our future looks like.
About the author
Simon Enoch
Simon Enoch is the senior researcher for Saskatchewan issues and policies. He holds a BA in Political Science, a Masters in Labour Studies and a PhD in Communication & Culture. Active in both the labour movement and media reform efforts, Simon has published in a variety of academic journals and other news media. He lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.
