Chatham-Kent (CK) council has unanimously approved an extensive report concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centres.
On Monday night, both councillors Ryan Doyle and Michael Bondy put forward motions.
The motions asked for similar studies to be completed, so Bondy withdrew.
The report Doyle requested will look into the scope of work of any study undertaken, information on the current regulatory environment for data centres at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels of government, and financial considerations like staffing resource requirements and the need for external consultants to undertake further studies.
The motion will also be shared with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO).
Doyle's hope is to show support for AMO's advocacy position to establish a strategy that will allow for meaningful inclusion of municipalities before approving or denying large scale data centres.
The motion was approved roughly one week after the municipality announced that a clean-energy manufacturing project is in the works.
The company is looking to build a factory to create sodium batteries that will be sold to AI data centers. CK Mayor Darrin Canniff confirmed that the project itself will not be a data centre.
"They produce batteries for data centres. So data centres will be their customers for their sodium batteries that they're going to produce," said Canniff. "It is not going to be a data centre."
The motion passed 15 to zero.
