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Oakville has enacted a one-year moratorium on new data centres, becoming the first Ontario municipality to take the step as local lawmakers grapple with the concerns surrounding the new wave of facilities powering artificial intelligence.
Councillors in the town southwest of Toronto have directed staff to study whether its own regulations need to be updated to address potential noise, vibration and emissions issues from data centres, as well as broader land-use considerations.
Tuesday’s moratorium approval in Oakville comes as neighbouring Mississauga is set to vote next month on its own pause and other Ontario municipalities study what guardrails they can put around the new developments.
While Oakville officials say the town has no formal data centre applications, developer Hive Digital Technologies in May announced plans for a 320-megawatt AI facility in the Greater Toronto Area.
Land records indicate a Hive subsidiary purchased property in Oakville days before it made the announcement.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Canadian Press.
The moratorium was sponsored by the councillor for the area where the property is located.
The AI data centre boom is coming to Canada and cooling the technology will require massive amounts of clean water. For The National, CBC’s Jonathan Montpetit dives into the consumption and uncovers a murky business with little oversight.
Other municipalities looking into moratoriums
Hamilton was the first Ontario municipality to take a proposed data centre moratorium to a vote, but it failed to pass. Mississauga directed staff to draft its own pause, with a vote expected next month.
Meanwhile, Waterloo Region voted Tuesday to direct staff to study data centre impacts and potentially advocate for a provincial framework setting out how to assess and manage proposed developments. Toronto city council passed a similar motion last month.
Competition among large tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google has fuelled a surge in demand for data centres, energy-hungry warehouses packed with powerful computer chips used to train and operate increasingly complex AI models.
Canada only has a handful of large hyperscale data centres, but dozens more are in the pipeline. In July, Meta announced plans for a one-gigawatt data centre in Alberta, to be powered by a new gas plant.
