As AI Data Centre Backlash Builds, What Will Smith Do?

Now that voters everywhere in North America are turning against artificial intelligence data centres hard and fast, what’s Alberta’s United Conservative Party going to do?

They’ve spent two years planning to woo data centres to Alberta as if they were the greatest industrial development since the invention of the steam engine. They even quietly created a special “concierge service” to make it easy for as many as 40 massive AI data centres to set up their noisy, polluting shops in rural Alberta.

Unsurprisingly, as journalist Andrew Nikiforuk described the burgeoning opposition to data centres recently in The Tyee, “rural Albertans, like working people everywhere, are asking why their communities should become sacrifice zones for multinational corporations hell-bent on constructing ugly windowless boxes to house computing power that will toss many out of work while sucking up capital, fossil fuel and water.”

So, now that the UCP is alienating significant parts of its own voting base, you have to wonder, will the party change course or double down?

The history of Premier Danielle Smith’s government suggests they’ll stick to trying to gaslight us into believing AI data centres are just “ digital refineries ” that will magically turn natural gas from clapped-out and otherwise uneconomic wells into big money.

South of the U.S. border, the impact of the “data centre backlash” on the crucial midterm elections is becoming serious enough it was considered worthy of a front-page story in the New York Times Saturday.

“The fight over data centres is suddenly at the epicentre of the midterm elections,” the Times reported. “Politicians are racing to tap into the backlash — or inoculate themselves — as political strategists in both parties described the issue as an unusually fast-moving force that is already reshaping races for the House, the Senate and governor’s mansions.”

The problem for American Republicans in particular — and maybe for the UCP too — is it’s becoming increasingly obvious AI data centres are a disaster for communities where they’re built and the argument for building them sucks.

In a nutshell, as is increasingly understood by American voters, regardless of their political identities, that argument is that AI data centres may kill your job, ensure your kids never work, destroy the value of your property, keep you awake at night, make you sick, poison your land, suck up all the water and make your energy bills go up, but... “There Is No Alternative!”

All of this will sound familiar to Albertans who are starting to pay attention to the UCP’s plans, as will the promises that water won’t be wasted because of closed-loop cooling technology and power prices won’t go up because data centres will have to generate their own electricity — claims that upon closer examination come with many caveats.

Since the argument for AI data centres isn’t an appealing one, there needs to be a sales pitch that can get the locals to go along with such schemes long enough to make them impossible to block, and that was a topic at a community meeting in St.