Because we need jobs, tax income and exposure to global markets.
The environmental and provincial impact will be minimal, they will generate their own power and water usage will incrementally increase 500k lpd on top of the existing 6.1m lpd draw on the lake (which has 34m lpd of safe usage)
No one can start any industry in this province without people getting upset and then wonder why we are so poor.
Thanks for replying, I appreciate getting your perspective.
Power use, they're offsetting *some* of their own use, not all for a long while. Until they do, the rest will come from the same supply we draw from NS Power, which will affect our rates, stability, and mean more coal and oil being burned until we're 100% clean.
Water, we can put the volume aside, the lake is suited. They're saying closed loop, which sounds good, but isn't really. One Meta is building in Wyoming purged 800,000g of waste water contaminated with sterilization-resistant bacteria into the city water supply recently. Anecdotally, anyone who's built a water-cooled computer can tell you how easy it is to get an outbreak, how badly they can fuck up your loop, and how nasty they can get.
Jobs are minimal. Construction at the start, then all they need is security and maintenance. They're big warehouses filled with GPUs running 24/7; the only people working there are swapping burnt-out GPUs. AI data centers need about 0.0002 FTEs per square foot, so about 40 permanent jobs for the 200,000 square foot phase 1. For perspective, a Superstore employs ~0.0025 FTEs per square foot, so the ~130,000 sqft Joe Howe location employs about 325 people.
Tax income, sure... IF it's profitable. Anthropic had $4.5b in revenue last year... and lost $8b doing it. Corporations are already moving away from AI due to costs, and that's while paying $1 for $3-4 of compute. We'll get payroll and property taxes up until the thing shutters.
Global markets, I'm with you, though this project and the company behind it ain't it. NS doesn't have any inherent advantages that make us better suited for producing tokens at scale, or at least not until we're generating more wind power than we can produce. The company itself, Everwind, is pivoting to data centers because its original plan to produce green hydrogen to ship to European markets has collapsed. That project was destined to be a boondoggle from the start, even if balcony solar and white hydrogen hadn't made it moot. I don't think we should be getting even deeper in to business with those fucks.
I'm not against progress. I'm against bad decisions. We've made a lot of them in the past, and this one smells a lot like those.
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u/HobbeScotch 16h ago edited 16h ago
I wanted this
Edit: suppose this is not a valid opinion