But Canadian companies are going to use AI. It’s their best path to “efficiencies” (as in ever-increasing profits achieved by laying off staff). So they will need data centers. Right now, most of that capacity is in the US and subject to US law. I don’t particularly like the idea of US companies have access to all of my data (although I’m pretty sure that ship has already sailed, sank and is now a thriving coral reef). If I’m going to get screwed by AI, I want it to at least be an AI with a maple leaf on it.
I despise much of what AI is doing to many fields but this panic over data centers is genuinely weird.
If we don’t have them the USA will have them all, and Americans cannot be trusted. We need infrastructure to defend ourselves.
Bearing this in mind, Canada could also use a Root Name Server. There are only 13 of them worldwide and 10 are in the US.
The US panic is because they let them build them damn near anywhere, and they apparently suck up all the water and electricity, because the US doesn’t seem to want to regulate them in any way. I’m hoping we could do better.
Electricity is a legitimate issue, obviously; power requires generation.
The water thing is honestly silly, unless you’re really dumb about where they go (or, like a tech billionaire, you’re a sociopath.) The water used in cooling a computer doesn’t GO anywhere, or get destroyed. It just gets warmer, and the amount of heat added to water in a data center is not significant in the grand scheme of things. Far, far, far more heat is added to the world in a myriad of other ways, and the way we use most of the water we use is much more environmentally damaging than a data center.
If there was any place in the entire world these minor environmental concerns could be effectively dealt with, ya gotta think it’s, you know, a really cold country with access to inconceivably vast amounts of water.
This depends on the cooling systems being used. Well, obviously the water is never destroyed. But open loop cooling systems making use of evaporative cooling lose a lot of water to evaporation, and the water in the system that doesn’t evaporate will skyrocket in mineral content. No water molecules have been destroyed, but plenty have been made unavailable for other uses.
How many data centers use open loop systems I do not know, and it would of course be possible to regulate data centers such that they are required to use closed loop systems, but that of course assumes that the relevant governments (mostly provincial jurisdiction in this case I would think) are interested in imposing such regulations.
Data centers in dry climates also require water for humidity regulation, as too-dry air poses dangers due to potential for static electricity buildup. Water used by humidifiers is also going to be lost to the atmosphere.
Again, not a huge concern. I’ve no doubt there are lots of places in the country where datacenters could be built where the HVAC requirements could be accommodated without deleterious effects to the surrounding communities. However, that absolutely will require that the relevant governments regulate the matter, because left to their own devices the companies building these things will absolutely utilize the least expensive methods to for cooling and humidity regulation regardless of whether those are ecologically sustainable.
I, for one, don’t really trust the governments of Danielle Smith, Scott Moe, or Doug Ford to impose the appropriate regulations.
And that’s a big part of the problem in the US. They seem to have put a lot of these things in areas that are already having problems with water supply, and then just not regulating them very well, making everything worse.
Canada does have a lot of water, but will we build these things way out in the bush next to a big lake? Probably not, which limits our ability to use all that water we have laying about.
From a recent headline:
Three quarters of data centre sites planned in Alberta are in high water stress areas
Here in Ontario there aren’t many places that AREN’T near a lake.
That actually would be an interesting challenge to figure out - what’s the furthest you can be from a lake while standing in Ontario?
Lots of educated evaluations on actual water use and consequences (and some weird hijacks) in this thread:
For water/cooling use for Datacenters, for any not already reading said thread.
It would depend a lot on what you consider a lake, but my bet would be somewhere in the Hudson bay lowlands.
It looks to me like Akimiski Island in James Bay doesn’t have any lakes on it, so on the NE coast you’re some 80km from the nearest little lake on the mainland. James Bay doesn’t count, of course, because while it’s a large body of water it is not a lake. I’m pretty sure this is the technically correct answer.
If you want furthest from a non-flowing body of water, I think you’d be looking at southeast of Sarnia halfway to Lake Erie, which would get you about 40km from all three of Huron, Erie, and Lake St Clair. It doesn’t look to me like anywhere in the north will beat that (around Moose River somewhere seems the most likely) unless you put a relatively large lower bound on what you’re counting as a lake.
Akimiski is in Nunavut, not Ontario.
I did not know that.
For whatever reason all (almost all?) the islands in Hudson bay are Nunavut, including barrier islands that are 1400 km from mainland Nunavut that you could probably hit with a rock from the Quebec shoreline.
Yeah, but that’s just a quirk of how Quebec was founded and expanded (from east-to-west).
On the eastern side of the province, Quebec has the Magdalen Islands that stretch way from the mainland into the Gulf of St Lawrence farther east then New Brunswick, PEI, and most of Nova Scotia.
Canada is hardly short on water and energy. AI has several concerns and governmental policy seemed to do nothing to address privacy, intellectual property, security, accountability, legal responsibility, job concerns, etc. Canada does not much encourage private or venture capital, but is better at building bureaucracies than subsidizing alies and “picking winners” - and should concentrate on making private investment more attractive. Having an advisory board of people who know much about AI with diverse views might help; one doubts politicians know much about it.
Data centres? Don’t mind building them; Canada needs infrastructure independent of our neighbours, with laws to match. But not on the waterfront of major cities. Build them in Boonieville.
Where, as pointed out above, there is little water to be had.
Ontario has 10,000+ lakes. Not remotely true.
How many data centers are planned next to these lakes?