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MORINVILLE — Hundreds of protesters chanted “Down, down with corporations” outside a northern Alberta county office on Sunday to voice their opposition to tech giant Meta’s plan to build a data centre.
The protest took place in Morinville, a town in Sturgeon County, where the company behind Facebook announced last month that it’s building a massive one-gigawatt data centre.
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Cars honked at rallygoers waving signs, including one showing a picture of Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a message on top: Expropriate The Billionaire.
Ben Baril, one of the protest organizers, said he was surprised by how many people showed up.
“For a rainy day, on a long weekend, I wasn’t expecting this many people … but it’s awesome,” said Baril, who is 20 and a business student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
“We don’t want this data centre here, and we don’t want this data centre anywhere else.”
Jessica Tomashiro, a resident of Sturgeon County, said she came to the rally because data centres have a huge thirst for water and electricity, and she worries Meta’s facility and the others Alberta plans to build by the end of the decade, will increase her bills.
“My water, my electricity prices are already high, so how much higher can they go?”
Data centres are physical facilities that house the computing hardware needed to store and distribute information for a variety of tech applications using artificial intelligence.
Meta has said its $13-billion-plus facility in Alberta will be online in the next two to three years. The facility is among several popping up across Canada amid the AI boom, and it is the first one Meta is building in Canada.
The Alberta government has set up a “concierge” service to attract so-called hyperscale developers to set up shop in the province and help companies navigate provincial regulations. But local concerns have been raised about water use, noise and utility bills because these facilities use a lot of electricity and water to both cool and power the computer chips.
Premier Danielle Smith has said Alberta’s grid operator will use surplus energy to power Meta’s centre until a new natural gas-fired plant — called the Greenlight Electricity Centre — starts powering it in 2030.
Smith has also said the data centre will use the same amount of water used by a typical golf course and features a closed-loop water cooling system so it won’t draw water from the surrounding area.
Sturgeon County Mayor Alanna Hnatiw, in a statement Sunday, encouraged communities and governments to be involved in regulatory oversight, and to be part of the development of international agreements that promote positive opportunities from AI.
She said she has heard concerns from residents in the last several weeks and they are valid.
“At the heart of it is genuine care for our communities, resources and our environment — which are concerns we all share,” Hnatiw said.
“Strong accountability frameworks provide necessary guardrails to protect citizens and our communities.”
Protesters at the Sunday gathering said they can’t trust the government or Meta.
Baril said a natural gas facility will power Meta’s centre but there’s no plan for how the other data centres Alberta plans to construct by the end of the decade will be energized.
He said the centres planned for Alberta and the rest of Canada could contribute to the climate crisis.
A recent United Nations University report said the environmental footprint of data centres globally already rivals some of the world’s largest countries.
“I’ve been concerned about the climate crisis since I was eight years old,” said Baril.
“The increased power generation is going to just obliterate our climate because of the amount of natural gas that we’re going to be using for this.”
Data centre developers say some environmental damage can be mitigated with sustainable design choices, such as recycling water in closed-loop cooling systems or capturing excess heat from servers and piping it into homes during winter.
Baril said protesters are also against data centres in Alberta and across Canada because the expansion of artificial intelligence threatens jobs.
“AI, for young people especially, represents a threat to our careers as it’s increasingly replacing what were good paying jobs.”
Emily Lachase, who drove 30 minutes north to Sturgeon County from Edmonton to attend the rally, said she is generally against the increased use of artificial intelligence.
“It’s important for us to keep our own creativity alive and make sure that we keep using our own brains instead of always relying on AI,” she said.
Gerry Hofs, a member of the advocacy group Seniors for Climate Action Now, said she attended the rally because she is against data centres altogether, especially one that Zuckerberg is behind.
“It’s an American billionaire and we do not need to be turning our resources over to somebody like that,” she said.
— with files from Jordan Omstead and Lauren Krugel
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