In February of this year, Regina and the RM of Sherwood first started talking about bringing an AI data centre into town. At a glance, it seems rather innocent- just a building full of humming circuits churning through ones and zeroes. But, are we comfortable with a large AI investment landing so close to home?

We’ve been hearing for years now that AI is going to be the death of us, one way or another. Countless movies like Alien or 2001: A Space Odyssey depict AI as unfeeling taskmasters quietly running the numbers with human lives. James Cameron thought it would be a one-two punch of nuclear strikes followed by an army of killer robots that can also travel through time. We’ve even seen some hints of malice in our current AI models.

I’m here to disappoint you today. As much as we’d all prefer something a bit sexier like killer robots, AI is probably going to contribute to our downfall hand-in-hand with climate change: slowly choking us out as policymakers drag us to the grave through inaction.

Now, we don’t have to get overly technical or delve into sci-fi to understand how this data centre may harm Regina and its residents. We just have to look at our utility bills.

The data centres are incredibly demanding of our resources, particularly when to comes to things like water, which is typically used for cooling. Google has already built data centres in The Dalles, Oregon. OregonLive reported that these data centres had used 355 million gallons of water over the past year- 29% of the city’s total water consumption in 2021.

Google also has two data centres in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which used up 1.3 billion gallons of water from the local supply, as described by their 2024 Environmental Report. And they’re not the only ones with these large centres. According to CNET, Meta’s data centres took in 1.39 billion gallons of water worldwide. Aside from the pressure that this puts on regions with pre-existing droughts or water shortages, local residents could also be footing the bill.

In an episode of “Water Resources Podcast” from the University of Texas, Dr. Landon Marston says that the costs of the infrastructure required for such consumption could show up as additional fees in regular households.

These centres are also very taxing on our power grids. A report by Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University says “data center and cryptocurrency mining growth could increase average U.S. electricity generation costs by 8%.” Such increases would show up on electricity bills.

Marston says that the scale of such usage is massive, and may only continue to get worse. “In 2018 . . . the most recent estimates at that point indicated data centres consuming a little over 200 terawatt hours . . . enough to power the entire state of California for 1.5 weeks,” he says.

Marston continues on to say that projections into 2028 show 325 to 580 terawatt hours being consumed by data centres- roughly 6.7% to 12% of U.S. electricity demand.

This will also quite likely come back to bite the everyday person. According to Bloomberg, areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices rise as much as 267% over the past five years.

Oh, and as the cherry on top, the pollutants being put out by these data centres is of great concern. Houston Business Review states that the air pollution alone will result in an estimated $20 billion in public health damage per year by 2028.

Honestly, I’d prefer the killer robots. At least that way, things would be over quickly. Instead, we need to watch as we inch ever-closer to the edge of the proverbial waterfall, while corporations pretend to not see it coming.