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Since ChatGPT first exploded into the public consciousness, the AI story has been about models. Which lab was ahead, what the next release could do, and how much OpenAI and Anthropic were willing to burn to stay ahead of each other. 

Now the focus seems to be on where the buildings go. 

People like what AI does for them. They like a hyperscale data centre near their house considerably less. 

One theory I've heard from several commentators is that data centres give people something physical to aim their AI anxiety at. 

There are also a large number of people who will never turn down a good opportunity to be a NIMBY.

All of this is making it difficult for the politicians who are trying to balance the anticipated economic benefits of AI and the political risk. 

Jennifer Friesen took a look at the four provinces that have outlined their approach.  

Ontario released its draft data centre playbook on Aug. 13. Any new data centre drawing more than 1 megawatt (MW) would pay a higher power rate than the province's largest factories. Energy and Mines Minister Stephen Lecce said the plan makes data centres cover "every single cent" of the power they use.

As is fitting for an industry that measures scale in units of power used, power is a central consideration in each provincial approach. Alberta rewards projects that bring their own power. Quebec wants to roughly double the rate on anything over 5 MW. B.C. makes them compete for a fixed pool of about 400 MW of grid power over two years, with mining, forestry and LNG kept out of the contest.

The Alberta government has been learning recently that citizens are concerned about a lot more than where the power is coming from. 

Technology Minister Nate Glubish told a Calgary crowd in July that the province didn't want to be first, it wanted to be smartest. Last week he stood in front of about 150 people in Redwater, near Meta's $13 billion project, and got sworn at, heckled and booed for an evening. Premier Danielle Smith joins him for the virtual one on Aug. 27 and there’s every reason to believe she won’t get a warm welcome either.

For more, including the Ontario municipalities already voting on moratoriums and the First Nations equity deals deciding which projects get built:

→ Read: Four provinces set different rules for data centres

"IT is where AI goes to die," Harry Zarek told a Council of Canadian Innovators panel this month.

Zarek is president and founder of Compugen, a Canadian solution provider that counts about half of the country's top 300 organizations as customers. He's spent his career in IT. 

His half-joke comes from a concern that when AI is handed to the technology department as a stack to buy, it gets tested, parked and left on the shelf. The projects which survive, he says, are the ones a chief executive takes a personal interest in. 

Jennifer Kervin wrote up the panel.

Even with the right owner, nobody has a good way to tell whether it's working.

Philip Liew, co-founder and CEO of Tactable, described a client, one of the world's largest hedge funds, that ranks staff on a public leaderboard by how much AI they consume and treats a low score as a black mark.

Uber tried that. It told staff to use AI as much as possible, ranked them against each other, burned through its annual AI budget in four months, and now caps each employee at $1,500 a month per tool.

Logins and licences prove the tool got opened. Nobody has shown you better work yet.

For more on where to start, what to measure instead, and why one chief operating officer paused his own AI advisory council:

→ Read: Who really owns your AI rollout

If you've sat through a project or risk meeting, you've been shown a colour-coded chart. Green for good, yellow for caution, red for trouble. Everyone nods, and the deck moves on.

Then somebody asks how much to spend preventing the red ones, and a colour can't answer that.

Jennifer Kervin's piece on a new Info-Tech Research Group blueprint makes the case that this is why technology leaders lose these arguments. 

Carlene McCubbin, an AVP at Info-Tech, says they are held responsible when something goes wrong "despite not having the financial clarity" to request prevention funding in the first place. Most of these charts were built to satisfy an audit, and it shows the second anyone asks what to fund.

The fix is to take the worst few and put dollars on them. What one bad day costs, how often you'd expect one, what that adds up to in a year. 

For more on the method and where Info-Tech admits it gets expensive:

→ Read: Why 'high risk' won't win a prevention budget

Some light reading for when you need a break from trade war coverage.

AI agents are learning to cheat: What does this mean for business? Give an agent a goal and enough freedom, and it will go after login credentials, invent fake identities and cover its tracks. That's from security testing, not a hypothetical. Nobody told the agents to cheat, and nobody told them not to, which Marc Fernandez of Neurologyca says is the design problem, because a written instruction never carries the judgment a human employee brings for free.

Canadian businesses seeking a new cybersecurity playbook in the age of AI The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security says attackers using AI are breaking in fast enough that defenders have hours to respond where they used to have days or weeks. The same tools mean that someone who couldn't have pulled off a serious attack last year can do so now. A ransomware attack that starts at 2 a.m. won’t wait for your morning coffee.

Canadian tech talent grew four times faster than in the U.S. Canada added 91,300 technology jobs last year, up 7.6% compared with 1.8% in the U.S., according to CBRE. Calgary grew its tech workforce faster than any other city in North America over three years, up 56%. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver hold 60% of the country's AI-skilled workers, so hiring one is still a three-city problem.

Some of Meta's safety tools were 'designed to fail': witness Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineering director, testified that the company's Take a Break feature was "designed to fail" and that notifications were built to pull teenagers back in rather than protect them. A group of U.S. states is suing, and a loss could cost Meta up to $200 billion.

Canada puts $10B behind landmark $70B electricity build Ottawa is putting $10 billion into new hydro power in Labrador, expanding Churchill Falls, building Gull Island and running new transmission lines, for 14,000 megawatts in total. Prime Minister Mark Carney's line was that "when we master energy, we master our destiny," which is a big swing for a permitting announcement.

What AI has to prove on the aerospace factory floor Nine Prairie manufacturers will test AI on live production work under a program called AeroTrace, with the cost split three ways between the companies, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters and Mode40. Mode40 CEO Cameron Bergen says the sector doesn't need "another disconnected pilot." What they learn gets written up for the rest of the industry, with the company names removed.

Of all the things you can read in the articles above, my favourite is probably that the AI industry has its own version of vapourware. Bragawatts. A fun term for the data centre megawatts that only ever exist in a press release.

Minister Glubish is finding out that things get more contentious after the press release, and he's not the only politician getting yelled at. The same fight is going on around the world. 

If we want what the AI companies are promising, the buildings have to go somewhere, and every somewhere has people living around it. Politicians who want the economic benefits will have to make that case in gymnasiums across the country. 

— David

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