Hamilton advances proposed data centre moratorium in pushback to rapid AI buildout

Hamilton city hall is seen in this file photo. (CTV News Toronto)

A proposed pause on new power-hungry data centres in Hamilton cleared a hurdle on Tuesday, the latest step in a growing pushback to Canada’s buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

A planning committee voted to send the proposed moratorium plan to Hamilton’s city council for a vote at a later date. The motion brought by Coun. Nrinder Nann would ask staff to draft a moratorium, framing it as a chance to give the city time to study data centre impacts and develop a framework to guide their future development.

At Tuesday’s committee meeting, dozens of residents spoke favourably of a moratorium.

“When decisions of this magnitude are to be made — decisions that disrupt electric grids, pollute the water and air, that reshape neighbourhoods — what role should the people that live there and the people chosen to represent them have? That’s the question that’s in front of you today,” said Nick Tsergas, a Hamilton health journalist who started a website to inform the local data centre pushback.

“If we get it right, cities across Canada will have a blueprint to follow. If we get it wrong, they will inherit our mistake.”

Hamilton has emerged as a battleground in Canada’s debate over the future AI infrastructure. A sprawling data centre campus proposal on the harbourfront, an area long shaped by the city’s steel industry, has sparked fierce pushback from local residents at a time when the federal government is pushing an AI strategy supportive of the sector.

A private investment firm is behind the Hamilton plan to redevelop about three square kilometres of the harbourfront as a “digital and industrial” hub called Steelport. Slate Asset Management’s proposal to carve out about a quarter of that land to advance a possible data centre campus was denied by a city committee earlier this month after hundreds of Hamiltonians spoke out against it.

Residents who spoke Tuesday said they worried large data centres could strain the electricity grid and drive up utility bills. Some said they would never back data centres running AI models that threaten jobs and are built on the work of artists and creators without their permission. Others feared round-the-clock noise, water pollution and heat radiating from a data centre would be most felt by neighbourhoods already bearing a disproportionate share of Hamilton’s industrial burden.

Anne Pasek, a Trent University researcher who spoke in favour of Tuesday’s motion, said a moratorium in Hamilton would be “groundbreaking”.

“To the best of my knowledge, they would be the first in Canada to issue a moratorium and pledge to have a sort of city-determined set of regulatory frameworks for this kind of infrastructure,” said Pasek, an associate professor who studies the climate impacts of the tech industry, in an interview.

She said a future municipal data centre framework could enforce updated noise and water pollution standards and ensure energy demands are kept in check.

“Part of the reason why data centres have been so wildly unpopular is because of a lack of transparency from the industry and a lack of clarity from regulatory bodies. Cities, I believe, are really uniquely positioned to help close that democratic gap and put this conversation on better footing,” she told the committee.

The motion approved Tuesday does not put a timeline on a moratorium or exempt data centres of a given size. The vast majority of the more than 200 written submissions to the committee supported the plan.

As residents asked councillors to hit pause, the developer behind the proposed harbourfront data centre campus told the city to work with “urgency to capture this generational opportunity”.

Slate’s written submission said its Steelport hub could reuse the site’s legacy energy infrastructure and says its location in Canada’s large population centre would ensure low latency transfer times to possible clients including universities and financial industries. A federally funded non-profit that supports the compute demands of university researchers has expressed interest in joining a portion of the proposed data centre campus.

“It is not an exaggeration to state that Hamilton risks losing a strategic opportunity to be at the forefront of the next major Canadian industry — and demonstrating to the country how data centres can be developed responsibly and to the benefit of the surrounding community,” read Slate’s submission, signed by the firms’ managing director and vice-president.

Canada has seen a surge in interest from large data centre developers driven by the artificial intelligence boom.

Hyperscale data centres can house high-powered computer servers needed to train and operate complex AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude. The facilities have the energy demands of a small city, and their rapid buildout has helped to fuel interest in natural gas generation, especially in Alberta, with critics worried the trend could derail efforts to cut planet-warming emissions.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has been supportive of a buildout it says could help keep data subject to Canadian law and reduce reliance on foreign tech giants.

The motion voted on Tuesday by Hamilton councillors said consultations on the recently released federal AI strategy did not include municipalities, nor did it propose regulations to “safeguard the environment, people, and our communities.”

Hamilton’s data centre pushback has had echoes elsewhere. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew turned down a massive data centre southeast of Winnipeg this month and said the sheer size of the project, the energy it would consume and its environmental impacts outweighed its limited benefits.

No Canadian city has passed a data centre moratorium but a wave of similar pauses have been approved in U.S. cities, including earlier this month in Seattle.

Canada has five data centres at the hyperscale level, at least 50 MW of energy capacity, says a study from York University researchers published in April, with dozens more in the development pipeline largely out of Alberta.

In Ontario, the energy grid manager said there has been a major spike in requests to connect from those types of data centres.

As of last month, there were around 6,000 MW of data centre-related requests in the queue, the Independent Energy Systems Operator told The Canadian Press in an interview. That was up by around 70 per cent from two months earlier.

The IESO did not say how many projects made up that 6,000 MW, equivalent to the energy use of roughly five million to six million homes. It noted many of the projects are in the early stages and the figures can fluctuate as applications are received and as projects either advance or withdraw their requests.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2026.

Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press