Vancouver AI Centres Will Capture Waste Heat

Kieran McConnell, president of Creative Energy in Vancouver, Canada, anticipates lower environmental and cost impacts for city residents due to new AI data centres. Vancouver is positioning two new AI facilities within the city limits. This approach aims to reuse electricity—first for AI processing and then for heating buildings—through an existing underground pipe network delivering energy to 215 buildings.

Creative Energy will capture heat byproduct from the AI centres and redistribute it to connected buildings. Roughly two-thirds of new data centres in the U.S. are being built in rural areas, a contrast to Vancouver’s urban plan. Though capturing waste heat exists, applying it to AI centres is relatively new and currently used in only a few locations globally.

However, organizations like Environmental Defence and the Green Party of B.C. express concerns about the centres’ true environmental impact, questioning Telus’s claim of 98% clean energy use given current energy imports. Telus plans to use a closed-loop liquid cooling system and collect rainwater from B.C.

Place Stadium to minimize water consumption, but the precise percentage remains unknown. The centres are projected to use about 85 megawatts of power annually—roughly 8% of the new Site C dam’s production—and the federal government has yet to fully address questions regarding the project.