Just sent this letter to the ministers of the environment for Canada and Alberta, as well to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.

Honourable Ministers,
The momentous rise of AI has many people wanting to build data centres. While I personally am skeptical of the long term impact in terms of jobs, even if you take claims at face value it is incredibly important that we not let a burgeoning industry push us backwards on climate goals, as neat as it seems.
We’ve already seen bad outcomes in the US and Canada from the chase of data centres:
- In Memphis, you have xAI building illegal gas turbines [1]
- You have AI data centres draining water from communities [2]
- Data centres being built in Alberta [3], which has one of the least green electricity grids in the nation.
A nation we need to establish some ground rules. New data centres need to be
1. Using renewable energy, or create appreciably more green generation than they are expected to consume. Carbon Capture, if deployed, must be required rather optional.
2. Be tightly regulated on their water consumption.
3. Have incentives provided to use waste heat from them for secondary purposes. Every data centre is an opportunity to build a district energy system and heat storage system to help heat homes through the winter, providing climate impacts.
We have an opportunity to set our regulatory environment to minimize our regret in the future.
We also should encourage the industry to change. We should be working with international partners to start labelling model hosts with a “tokens-per-tone” measure of CO2 intensity, and encourage the development of time-of-use token pricing to build efficient use of renewable resources into models.
[1]: https://www.selc.org/press-release/new-images-reveal-elon-musks-xai-datacenter-has-nearly-doubled-its-number-of-polluting-unpermitted-gas-turbines/
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
[3]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/property-report/article-new-data-centre-will-be-one-of-canadas-most-powerful/