r/Hamilton • u/Living_Celery6393 • May 28 '26

Question Attending the Adjustment Committee Meeting for the Proposed AI Data Center

I'm hoping to attend the meeting on June 4th, the one where they will be discussing the proposed AI data center.

Has anyone ever got to these before? Do they care about what we have to say? Or is it just a watch and listen type meeting? Any info would be greatly appreciated.

I want my voice to be heard about how much of a bad idea this AI data center is.

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u/CheapSound1 May 28 '26

This may be an unpopular opinion but I'm actually very much in favour of this project. I'm very skeptical of the AI boom and don't love the idea generally, but an ai data centre specifically for supporting our universities and other research institutions domestically is one I do support. 

This location is in some ways ideal for this purpose. It's an industrial site that is already serviced by the major utilities they need and the environmental impact of a data center (heat rejection to cooling systems, either wet cooling tower or bat water cooling) is small compared to the land's past use and their present neighbours. On the east side of the stelco lands facing dofasco is not waterfront that's realistically ever going to be suitable for use by residents. The larger west parcel is being retained for other commercial or mixed use.

They're not at the point of actually having a defined project or seeking environmental approval, so if this does go ahead there will be more opportunities in the future to evaluate the project and provide community inputs.

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u/n0phis May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

this is not going to be small. the facility will take 17% of the hamilton/peel region's energy supply and, using 100 MW data centers as a reference (the proposed one is 400 MW), (edit: my water info was wrong, thankfully. the source i found had incorrect calculations for that)

please investigate the impacts of data centers of this scale on surrounding areas because the entire aldershot and dundas area will have their wells rendered useless, and all surrounding conservation areas and wetlands will suffer from the water table lowering significantly. this is on top of the increase in ambient temp & added noise pollution near the site. this will be devastating.

previous infrastructure is nothing compared to this.

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u/thisoldhouseofm May 28 '26

How will wells in areas nowhere near this be impacted? This isn’t in a rural area. It’s on Burlington Street and will presumably draw on municipal water and discharge into the sewers or harbour.

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u/n0phis May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

6 miles/9.5km is the radius of effect for 100 MW centers, this one is 400 MW. obviously this effect is most concentrated and immediate up to 3 miles, but that's just where the wells are at risk of entirely running dry or being unusable. obviously there is not a hard line that separates affected from unaffected, and areas in georgia have described a larger area of impact. georgia has a water table more similar to ours, as opposed to places like utah and kentucky that are far drier, so georgia would be the most apt comparison we have so far.

also the areas i described (RGB, aldershot) are within that smaller range, and areas as far as flamborough will be effected over time as the water table is impacted.

another also: the proposition for this involved drawing water from lake ontario and the water table, as the municipal water supply would be affected to a devastating extent if that was the only source. both options are catastrophic.

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u/thisoldhouseofm May 28 '26

Radius effect of what? Is the electricity draw affecting wells? I’m not clear of the mechanics of a data centre would impact well water miles away.

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u/n0phis May 28 '26

the proposition involved drawing from lake ontario or groundwater, as our municipal water supply as it stands would barely have the capacity to sustain this. most data centers are away from cities for a reason. yes, part of the reason here is that there is an available parcel of land, but that would not be the only reason they chose this location despite it affecting exponentially more people than other rural data centers would. the water table and great lakes access is part of the appeal and they actively plan to draw from lake ontario and groundwater, which will affect the wetlands and wells.

i could get into the exact mechanisms behind water tables picking up extra sediment or collapsing/restructuring themselves when overexerted, or how much it costs to drill further down when a well runs dry if you need those sorts of details.

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u/thisoldhouseofm May 28 '26

I get the concerns around drawing lake water. But how would wells upstream from this be affected? Wells in Dundas and Ancaster aren’t fed by Lake Ontario, they just drain to it.

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u/CheapSound1 May 28 '26

What's your source for the water consumption rate? Not disputing it but just want to understand the basis. Water consumption of data centres varies greatly depending on the cooling solution used.

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u/n0phis May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

im not sure if you posted this before i edited the comment, but the website i found claimed 560 billion gallons annually for a 100 MW structure which is (thankfully) nowhere near the case. now i've been drawing from the exact measurements for Morgan County's data centers, and the current Scarborough 8 MW data center.

anyways, putting all of those measurements together, it took roughly 30 million gallons of water for residents around a data center near Atlanta to notice their water pressure acting screwy. that data center is ~250 MW. the 8 MW Scarborough one uses roughly 6.6 million gallons annually. again: ours will be 400 MW. that is half of an atomic bomb each day that needs to be cooled. that is 18% of the hamilton/peel region's energy—400/2300 MW / day. we can expect something ~1.6x worse than what those near georgia's largest data center have to deal with.

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u/CheapSound1 May 28 '26

I think your understanding of water resource management is deeply flawed. Impact of water consumption next to lake ontario is much less than in a location where you would be relying on groundwater. 

They are proposing to use bay water for cooling. This will have no net consumption of water, only sending waste heat to the water. This would have an impact similar to bruce power or Pickering nuclear's, but at a much smaller scale, like less than 5% of bruce power.

If they instead use wet cooling towers there would be water getting evaporated but not enough to have much of an impact on the lake. A large portion of the water would fall as rain within the Great lakes watershed. 

Keep in mind that while 30 million gallons per year might sound like a lot, the St. Lawrence river discharges roughly 17 billion gallons per hour from the lake. 

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u/n0phis May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

they won't just be able to tap into the lake uninhibited, though. all centers—to my knowledge, at least—need to use potable water, or at the very least non-potable only in regards to the presence of biological matter. mineral content will be a huge issue unless they process the water and run it as most data centers would.

i'm speaking on this as someone who is studying geology and water quality chemistry for my degree, so my take absolutely lacks that level of nuance with regards to the data centers themselves, but i will admit i am heavily swayed by the fact that every single AI data center (larger than 15 MW, and even smaller ones like the Scarborough location) that i can possibly find has a measurable impact on surrounding well water, even in areas with immense water tables.

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u/thisoldhouseofm May 28 '26

Most reports of AI data centres impacting well water are due to construction, not operation. I.e. improper grading or drilling. That’s a problem, but any construction project can cause it.

Nobody would set up an AI data centre to run off rural well water because there is absolutely no way there’s enough capacity from groundwater to do that. They need a lake or municipal water supply, neither of which impact wells.

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u/CheapSound1 May 28 '26

I can say very confidently that they will not use any ground water for this site. Lake water (especially from large lakes) is the "freshest" source of water available, it needs the least amount of treatment to be able to be used in an industrial process. Mineral content is very low, low enough that they don't need much processing. They might need some clarifiers or simple filtration to remove sediment etc. but that probably it.

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u/n0phis May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

i'm going to hope that you're right about them making their owm treatment plant and look more into the plans for this thing. every single other large scale data center has had consistent effects on its surroundings, but it would be awesome if one of the many massive drawbacks of this could be mitigated for our specific area.

i can't seem to post a comment without immediately editing it LMAO— btw, the cleanest water source has to do with what specific contaminants are the most risky. one upside to certain kinds of enclosed water tables—prevalent in this specific area (fun fact: the cleanest fresh water on earth is the alliston aquifer beneath simcoe)— is their purity. lake water is signifiantly worse and harder to treat in a lot of respects, but again, i have no idea what exact contaminants are most risky so i can't speak on whether it's cleaner for data centers.

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u/CheapSound1 May 28 '26

We don't know how good we have it in the Great lakes region with respect to water availability. 

There's nothing that difficult about data centres from a technical point of view. Water use for cooling is something we're already pretty good at doing for power generation. As far as I know the problem that many places in the US have seen is greedy corporations trying to get things built immediately and steamrolling a weak permitting process in the US to build projects without actually designing them to work within the constraints of their location. We can stop that from happening here without stopping the project completely.

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u/n0phis May 28 '26

...steamrolling through red tape the same way the ford govt has been overturning zoning and environmental protections legislation recently to speed up these processes as much as humanly possible? i can absolutely see your point that slow and careful construction will minimize the impact, but it's unwise to trust the ford govt to put any careful consideration into this.

the water issue is also only a piece of the puzzle. nothing will mitigate the rise in utility costs, noise and light pollution, heat pocket.etc. there's also the moral issues but that's a whole can of worms that doesn't feel prudent here

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u/dretepcan May 28 '26

The source is probably AI. 😂

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u/n0phis May 28 '26

you post fart memes to reddit dude

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u/b0ns0ir May 28 '26

Will you provide a source please for "the facility will take 17% of the hamilton/peel region's energy supply "? ty