Burlington Council Says No to a Data Centre Freeze, for Now

After a nine-hour meeting packed with residents, Burlington council decided not to freeze the data centre proposed for South Service Road. The catch: because the city's rulebook does not mention data centres at all, the two-storey facility can go through staff-level site plan approval and be built without a council vote.

Ward 2 councillor Lisa Kearns, seconded by Mayor Marianne Meed Ward, had pushed for a report on an interim control bylaw, a pause that would freeze the current proposal while the city writes proper guidelines. Council decided staff will not bring that moratorium option back, though it is not fully off the table.

What did pass: staff will start drafting rules for future data centres, and the city will formally ask the province and Ottawa for a national framework on AI. Both look ahead to the next proposal, not this one, which keeps moving.

What is actually being proposed

The facility at 3110 South Service Road comes from a new company, Gliese AI, and it is smaller than the name suggests. A Gliese representative told council the 17-megawatt building is co-location rental space where local businesses store data, not a ChatGPT-style operation, which would need gigawatts. A Waterloo computer science professor added that the noise, vibration and pollution fears are overblown at this size, and that Ontario already makes data centres over 50 megawatts hard to build.

Not everyone left reassured. Residents have launched a website to track the proposal, and the real decision now lands in December, after October's municipal election.