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.
That’s not unfortunate, that’s downright lazy and really shitty of them. That says to me that they see being on city council as a job, not as a public service.
Anyway, the main reasons would be water usage and contamination. Any water used in the data centres will likely be contaminated with PTFEs because that’s really the only kind of hose they can use to move water around all the electronics, AFAIK. Also the massive amounts of electricity that would be used *driving up the cost for everyone, not sure where you get your electricity though.
I suppose there could be more reasons, but those would be specific to your area.