Hundreds protest Meta's plan for massive data centre in northern Alberta county - Yahoo! Finance Canada

MORINVILLE — Hundreds of protesters chanted "Down, down with corporations" outside a northern Alberta county office on Sunday to voice their opposition to tech giant Meta's plan to build a data centre.

The morning protest took place in Morinville, a town in Sturgeon County, where the company behind Facebook announced last month that it's building a massive one-gigawatt data centre.

Cars honked at rallygoers waving signs, including one showing a picture of Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a message on top: Expropriate The Billionaire.

Ben Baril, one of the protest organizers, said he was surprised by how many people showed up.

"For a rainy day, on a long weekend, I wasn't expecting this many people ... but it's awesome," said Baril, who is 20-years-old and a business student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

"We don't want this data centre here, and we don't want this data centre anywhere else."

Jessica Tomashiro, a resident of Sturgeon County, said she came to the rally because data centres have a huge thirst for water and electricity, and she worries Meta's facility and the others Alberta plans to build by the end of the decade, will increase her bills.

"My water, my electricity prices are already high, so how much higher can they go?"

Data centres are physical facilities that house the computing hardware needed to store and distribute information for a variety of tech applications using artificial intelligence.

Meta has said its $13-billion-plus facility in Alberta will be online in the next two to three years. The facility is among several popping up across Canada amid the AI boom, and it is the first one Meta is building in Canada.

The Alberta government has set up a "concierge" service to attract so-called hyperscale developers to set up shop in the province and help companies navigate provincial regulations. But local concerns have been raised about water use, noise and utility bills because these facilities use a lot of electricity and water to both cool and power the computer chips.

Premier Danielle Smith has said Alberta's grid operator will use surplus energy to power Meta's centre until a new natural gas-fired plant — called the Greenlight Electricity Centre — starts powering it in 2030.

Smith has also said the data centre will use the same amount of water used by a typical golf course and features a closed-loop water cooling system so it won't draw water from the surrounding area.

Sturgeon County Mayor Alanna Hnatiw, in a statement Sunday, encouraged communities and governments to be involved in regulatory oversight, and to be part of the development of international agreements that promote positive opportunities from AI.