But the data centre boom is zeroing in on one province: Alberta. The prairie province accounts for 93 per cent of all planned data centre capacity in Canada, in large part because of its cheap natural gas-powered electricity. Plus, Alberta’s UCP government has been courting the AI industry, offering corporate tax incentives to data centre builders and exempting them from otherwise routine environmental impact assessments.

The general feeling is that AI data centres are being built too fast, and too big. According to an Angus Reid poll, 68 per cent of Canadians would oppose a large AI data centre near their home.

But Lyndsey Rolheiser, the urban economist who co-authored the York University paper, said that this assumption isn’t backed by data. She explains that in places like the U.S. where a little more data about the medium-term impacts of data centres is available, it shows that when states offered tax incentives for data centres, the public purse was being drained, not filled. For example in Virginia, for every dollar the state gave up by offering tax breaks to data centres, it generated only 48 cents in new state revenue.

The misconception about data centres’ upsides is being nurtured by the AI industry. Lobbying records show the developers behind two of Hamilton’s proposed data centres have met repeatedly with federal and provincial officials in recent months.

The CEO of the American Petroleum Institute recently advised tech companies to get ahead of public opposition by stressing the industry’s “benefits,” the way the oil industry learned to do during the fracking battles of the 2000s and 2010s.

The fossil fuel industry has an incentive to hand out pages from its PR playbook: it stands to become a profitable supplier of energy to a boom of power-hungry data centres. The federal government quietly got on board: despite claiming that Canada will become a leader in building AI data centres “sustainably,” in internal documents the government wrote that one of the top “public policy benefits to Canada” of building data centres is the creation of new markets for Canadian natural gas.

Instead, he said that the framing of AI as a national imperative “is being weaponized as an excuse to create domestically what we already have in the U.S., which is a billionaire-driven tech oligarchy that is enabled by the government.” Here, he points to the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, whose fortune was built with the help of U.S. government subsidies. In Canada, the Carney Liberals’ AI approach appears to be taking notes from Build Canada, a consortium of Canada’s wealthiest tech bros.