Hamilton is on the verge of a data centre moratorium vote. Others are taking notice.

Danielle Sheahan, a Hamilton psychotherapist, helps her clients find hope. She didn’t expect to find her own during a meeting of a little-known city committee.

Sheahan says she was “shocked” when Hamilton’s committee of adjustment rejected in early June a developer’s application to split off part of Steelport, a sprawling industrial harbourfront property, for a possible data centre campus.

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Sheahan, who helps run an Instagram account pushing back on data centres, said the outcome hit harder than she expected.

“It was like the first moment I think I’ve actually felt hope in about 10 years,” said Sheahan, a former tech worker who became a psychotherapist after she said she was laid off from her job at a large U.S. firm during a maternity leave.

“I need to feel some hope that our world actually can be a democracy.”

The decision not only offered hope, but also momentum to what’s been an active stretch of data centre activism in Hamilton.

Now, Hamilton is on the verge of becoming the first city in the country to put a pause on new data centres. A vote is expected Wednesday on the one-year moratorium, which could be renewed for a second year by council.

Hamilton would join a wave of cities in the United States who have passed similar pauses. On Tuesday, New York enacted the first statewide moratorium on data centres larger than 50 megawatts.

Supporters in Hamilton say a moratorium will give the city time to develop guardrails around a new wave of data centres powering the artificial intelligence boom, as local lawmakers wrestle with energy, noise and water concerns. Critics of the moratorium say it could jeopardize a multimillion-dollar investment opportunity in the city, a steelmaking hub hit hard by U.S. tariffs, and sweep up smaller or research-focused facilities in the pause.

Other Canadian cities are taking notice as organizers in Hamilton help activists elsewhere set up their own campaigns. Meanwhile, Burlington, Mississauga and Vancouver are all expected to debate similar proposals this month.

Coun. Nrinder Nann, the sponsor of Hamilton’s moratorium proposal, says another 10 cities across the country have also been sent copies of her motion.

“We’re not buying the hype that this needs to happen so urgently – not going to happen,” Nann said in an interview.

“Hamiltonians have a long history of saying when people come into our town and try to ram things through, that we deserve to have a say in it. And if that means pausing the project for a year, then that’s what we’re going to do.”

Competition among firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google has fuelled a surge in data centres, warehouses packed with powerful computer chips used to train and operate increasingly complex AI models.

These AI-ready facilities often require vast amounts of electricity and water to both cool and power the computer chips. A recent United Nations University report says the environmental footprint of data centres globally already rivals some of the world’s largest countries.

Canada only has a handful of large hyperscale data centres, but dozens more are in the pipeline. Just last week, Meta announced its plans for an Alberta data centre powered by a new gas plant. The facility will consume roughly as much electricity as three quarters of nearby Edmonton.

Data centre developers say some impacts can be mitigated with sustainable design choices, such as recycling water in closed-loop cooling systems or capturing excess heat from servers and piping it into homes during winter.

Residents backing Hamilton’s moratorium say they want guarantees and transparency, not promises.

“The only way it’s possible is when we stop participating in a race,” said Bhavyatta Bhardwaj, a Hamilton resident and tech researcher who has held cybersecurity jobs in both public and private sectors.

“It will give us time to understand and really, intentionally, with more awareness, build a framework and a governance that even the province and feds can build on.”

Hamilton emerged as a flashpoint in Canada’s AI-infrastructure debate this year as residents learned more about plans for a possible data centre at Steelport, the three-square-kilometre redevelopment on a former steelmaking site led by Slate Asset Management.

Residents were concerned a data centre’s possible noise, water and heat impacts would be most felt by a neighbourhood already bearing the brunt of the city’s industrial burden. Others worried a large data centre could strain the local electricity grid and drive up utility bills, while delivering relatively few long-term jobs. The project also became a proxy for broader concerns about the rapid rise of AI, from workforce disruptions to misinformation.

Slate has filed an appeal of the committee of adjustment’s decision to reject its application to sever a quarter of the Steelport land for a possible data centre campus.

In an interview, Slate managing director Steven Dejonckheere said the severed land “most likely” wouldn’t have been used only for data centres, though he said it was too early to tell how big a campus could be. He framed data centres as one piece of a broader vision for the site as a manufacturing and logistics hub.

Dejonckheere said the proposed moratorium “calls into question Hamilton’s willingness to explore new investments.”

A moratorium “is kind of a sledgehammer tool where really we should have a more precise approach,” he said.

The only group with publicized interest in joining a data centre at Steelport is the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. The federally funded non-profit tasked with securing computing space for researchers says it had applied for funding from Ottawa to set up a facility on a small portion of the site.

Dejonckheere declined to confirm or deny whether the company had been in talks with hyperscalers, such as OpenAI or Meta.

Slate had requested a 400-megawatt connection to Ontario’s grid for the Steelport development. Dejonckheere said that application was recently revised down to around 200 megawatts to better reflect what was set aside for the former steel mill, but Slate expects to eventually apply for more power.

“I don’t know that we have a hard target. We will just back into a land-use mix afterwards based on what’s responsibly available,” said Dejonckheere.

Alectra, the municipally-owned utility, declined to comment on the application and did not respond to an interview request.

As the moratorium proposal gained traction, Slate sent lobbyists to Queen’s Park last month for a new round of talks with Premier Doug Ford’s government, according to filings with the province’s lobbyist registry.

Lobbying records also indicate that earlier this year, and before a moratorium was proposed, Slate raised the idea of a special economic zone designation with the province. The controversial tool gives Ford’s cabinet the power to exempt projects from provincial or local laws.

Slate acknowledged it spoke with the province about its qualifications but said it has not formally asked for the designation. The province did not respond to repeated questions from The Canadian Press about whether Ford’s cabinet would consider such a request.

“No digital infrastructure project will proceed unless it contributes to the local economy and the company commits to paying the full cost of energy,” a spokesperson for Vic Fedeli, Ontario’s minister of economic development, job creation and trade, said in a statement.

In Ontario, data centre projects with cumulative demands of about 7,000 megawatts – enough power for roughly 6 million homes – have active requests to connect to Ontario’s grid as of this month, the Independent Electricity System Operator said. That’s double what was in the queue earlier this year, though the IESO says most projects are in very early stages and numbers will fluctuate as they advance, pause or withdraw their applications.

The IESO’s 2026 forecast says data centres could make up close to 8.6 cent of the province’s total demand by 2050, about 60 per cent more than the previous year’s forecast.

Hamilton’s moratorium proposal easily cleared its first test before city council last month in a 15-1 vote, but there are signs Wednesday’s outcome could be tighter.

The mayor called a special meeting of council on Tuesday to discuss the issue but initially only invited speakers from groups backing data centre proposals. That included McMaster University, which is pursuing its own project, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

McMaster and its partner s2e Technologies have asked the city for an exemption for smaller data centres primarily established to support research activities, as it explores a possible facility at the former Hamilton Spectator building.

“We believe this project is fundamentally different from the large commercial data centres that have prompted public concern,” the proponents wrote in a letter to council.

Logan McLean, a McMaster student, is among the moratorium backers who has pressed council to reject the exemption requests.

“If AI is really as transformative as they say, and I don’t for sure about that yet, then we should have some caution and we should have input from the people who do have skin in the game around these centres,” McLean said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 14, 2026.