For decades, the facility at 3650 Danforth Ave. in Scarborough housed a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. But since 2023, it’s been an 8 megawatt data centre operated by Stack Infrastructure. It’s one of many across the GTA that have caught the attention of at least one environmental group.
“We’re concerned about the noise and emission levels produced by this data center,” explains Anna Hardy with Climate Fast. “We know that they have self-reported noise and pollution levels that they’ve already provided to the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks, but we don’t know if they’ll actually follow them.”
Those with Climate Fast believe the public should know where these rapidly growing data centres in Ontario are located and how they’re affecting neighbourhoods.
“So a data center is basically a building that holds a collection of very large computers,” says Daniel Gruner, the CTO of SciNet High Performance Computing Consortium. “In the case of the new AI boom, it means computers that are very power hungry.”
“It hosts your Instagram posts, your chats through WhatsApp – everything runs through a data center that is internet-based. And importantly, running a data center is not only expensive, it consumes quite a bit of resources,” added Viet Vu, the manager of economics research at the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University.
These facilities have drawn concern from communities across North America over issues relating to emissions, water usage to cool the machines, and electricity.
Stack Infrastructure is currently an 8 megawatt data centre with plans to expand the capacity to 56 megawatts. For context, that’s enough to power about 56,000 homes. But experts say there’s no need to worry about strain on the power grid.
“The nice thing is at least in Canada and Toronto, there is ample amount of clean and abundant energy and water for it to be used, unlike some other locations around the world,” says Vu.
But there is also the noise. Videos posted to social media have captured the sound that some data centres can generate.
“The City of Toronto does actually include such noise in their noise bylaws, which provides, I think, a good venue for legislators and policymakers to continuously monitor the impact of these data centers are having on local communities,” says Vu.
But as the industry expands, activists want tighter reins on it. Groups like Climate Fast are calling for a moratorium on development and more transparency in the approval process.
“We need to make sure that each data center that is trying to get built has public input and has the community involved,” says Hardy. “As taxpayers and rate payers, we don’t want to be bearing the brunt of these AI data centers, so it’s so important for there to be public consultation, which does not exist at all in Ontario at the moment.”
CityNews reached out to Stack Infrastructure to learn more about their operations, but has yet to receive a response.
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