I’m requesting assistance to draft an email to our city council here in small-city-near-a-big-city Canada to help them decide to not allow an AI datacenter to be built. They said they won’t read a big long letter with citations and everything which is sort of unfortunate, because it’s what I had prepared, but I feel I’ve got to write something.
Is there a list of punchy and true reasons why a small community would absolutely not want one of these things up in Canada here in a short form? My habit of over-writing things will only hurt, so it needs to make sense to people only barely tech-literate. This is why I need help.
Background: I run a medium-sized IT firm and am very familiar with how they operate and what they entail. In fact, my company was selected to help implement the center until we saw the plans and the future scale (more than 10x) with the lack of care they envisioned and chose to back out completely.
Here’s a few of the biggest concerns, at least from what I’ve read about from people’s experiences living near existing ones.
And that’s not to mention secondary effects, like how it can do things like draw in crowds of temporary workers that then incentivizes short term rentals (i.e. Airbnb’s) in the local area over actual homeowners, and can drive up housing costs, or how it can attract local subsidies that would otherwise go to smaller businesses that actually really need it.
Isn’t the water used for cooling? If so, discharged warmed water can adversely affect local wildlife, including the fish people fish for and the animals people hunt.
To add onto this, like others have said, it also doesn’t actually create any long-term jobs. It’s a construction project, then a remote facility, nobody’s ever at these things