{"id":274497,"date":"2025-11-10T16:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T16:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/274497\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T16:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T16:09:07","slug":"conference-board-of-canada-warns-of-power-water-and-environmental-impact-of-massive-ai-and-cloud-data-centres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/274497\/","title":{"rendered":"Conference Board of Canada Warns of Power, Water and Environmental Impact of Massive AI and Cloud Data Centres"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As tech companies turn to Canada\u2019s water and energy to help fuel massive AI data centres, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conferenceboard.ca\/insights\/ai-on-the-horizon-october-30-2025\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Conference Board of Canada is raising questions<\/a> about the cost, not just to the economy, but to the environment as well. <\/p>\n<p>AI companies and cloud data providers are making moves to plug into what they see as Canada\u2019s vast, clean natural resources, but the Conference Board cautions that the trade-offs are real. <\/p>\n<p>Canadian policy makers have yet to lay out long-term plans for impact on grid <\/p>\n<p>The Board says Canadian policy makers have yet to lay out a long-term vision for the impact on Canadians, the energy grid, and environmental sustainability. <\/p>\n<p>Data centres require big tracts of land, huge amounts of energy and vast amounts of water to keep cool. The Conference Board\u2019s Graham Dobbs says that level of consumption competes with the needs of communities, particularly in northern and rural areas. <\/p>\n<p>Water needs to cool data centres will be huge<\/p>\n<p>He says a proposed data centre in British Columbia would consume about 70,000 litres of water per day. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere was actually some research done recently that on average, water usage for large (conventional) data centres is about 19 million litres per day.\u201d He says water use in the range of 19 to 20 million litres per day is equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 residents.  <\/p>\n<p>Massive data centres would put a significant strain not only on the population, but resources and the environment as well says Dobbs, which is why appropriate policies must be in place. <\/p>\n<p>And without proper regulation, Dobbs says there\u2019s no way to protect water consumption, or prevent the cost of increased use and demand from increasing hydro and other costs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As tech companies turn to Canada\u2019s water and energy to help fuel massive AI data centres, the Conference&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-274497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}