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.
First of all, gather information about why data centers are bad for communities yourself. You need a clear understanding of what this topic is about if you want to be able to communicate these facts clearly. Otherwise anyone can discredit your concerns with a few questions you have no answer to. Secondly, find allies instead of trying to accomplish this on your own. Find local politicians who are likely to be on your side and contact them. Is there something like a regular town hall meeting? Environmental groups? Unions? You could present something there to find people willing to help. You need to amplify your voice to be heard.