Elbows up. This defiant sentiment of decoupling Canada from our newly hostile neighbour propelled Prime Minister Mark Carney to his electoral upset last year. So why is Carney’s Minister of Natural Resources Tim Hodgson now signaling that Canada plans to deepen our ties to Donald Trump by providing natural gas to American data centres powering the artificial intelligence arms race?
Hodgson made the remarks in a March interview with Bloomberg, recounting his recent discussions with the Trump Administration. “We talked about how we could help send more gas down to help you export more off the Gulf Coast and to help you with your AI strategy,” Hodgson said. “Obviously, a key component of the AI race is building more data centers. That requires more natural gas. We can provide that gas.”
President Trump owes a large part of his re-election to backing from tech billionaires heavily invested in AI, and obligingly declared the United States will do “whatever it takes” to achieve AI dominance. His administration is already imposing toxic politics onto this disruptive new technology, recently listing tech giant Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company refused the government unfettered access to their AI model for potential use in mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
Trump recently announced plans to sideline state legislatures from creating their own AI safeguards and even trotted out an AI-generated map showing Canada and Greenland absorbed in the United States. Is this what the Canadian government is supporting?
DeSmog recently documented how the Canada Pension Plan is also investing billions in American fossil fuel extraction and Trump’s AI agenda.
Obviously Canada’s efforts at elbow-elevation need work. Hodgson’s pledge to provide natural gas for massive American data centres further undermines Canada’s already tattered climate goals. Burning fossil fuels to power a dangerous artificial intelligence arms race accomplishes the impressive alchemy of making two of the leading threats to civilization worse at the same time.
The United Nations just documented how fossil fuels are pushing the planet beyond critical tipping points, particularly around ocean temperatures. Data centre energy consumption is exploding, accounting for almost 5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2024 and is projected to reach up to 12 percent by 2028. Over half of this ballooning demand is generated from fossil fuels.
Enormous data centre buildouts are also disrupting local communities in places like rural Pennsylvania, as recently reported by DeSmog. The town of Archbald has only 5,400 residents but may soon need to accommodate five separate data centres totaling 13.4 million square feet of industrial buildings. Routine council meetings have become standing-room only affairs with angry residents overflowing onto the sidewalk outside their town hall.
“Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people showed up on a weeknight in the middle of winter because they’re scared and they’re angry that it seems as if every available acre of land in our community will eventually be turned into a windowless box that hums 24-7 and sends most of its profits someplace else,” warned Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan. A fierce opponent of the data centre boom impacting Pennsylvania, Gaughan called the issue “one of the biggest environment and social threats of our generation.”
There is sound reason for citizen concern. The gargantuan resource demand of these facilities can inflate electricity rates, overload the grid and delay scheduled closings of coal-fired generating plants. Recent estimates project that data centres could consume a staggering 106 GW of power by 2035, greater than the current installed capacity from either nuclear or hydro in the United States.
Two thirds of recent installations have also been built in already water-stressed areas like Arizona, Texas, and the Colorado River Basin. A large data centre can consume 5 million gallons of water each day, the equivalent of a community of up to 50,000 people. By 2028, this collective demand in America alone could reach 33 billion gallons per year – the equivalent of 360,000 households. While some companies are moving to cooling using air conditioning instead of water, this trade-off only increases already enormous electricity demands.
Canadian regulators are likewise bending over backwards to accommodate Big Tech, regardless of the consequences to local communities or the environment. DeSmog recently revealed how the Carney government caved in on clean energy regulations after being lobbied 37 times by Alberta gas giant Capital Power that is planning to build a large gas-powered AI data centre in the province.
The Saskatchewan government enthusiastically approved a gas-powered server farm south of Regina over the vocal concerns of local residents about noise pollution and other impacts. The Alberta government just exempted a 7.5 GW data centre proposal touted by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary from provincial environmental assessment, even though the gas-fired facility would require seven times the power produced by the Site C dam.
Burning natural gas to power server farms benefits the fossil fuel industry, at the expense of almost every other human endeavour. Putting it another way: higher electricity bills, increased emissions, imperiled water supplies, automation-related job losses, sleep-disruption and a possible AI apocalypse. Data centres – what’s not to like?
