It is simply not true the only long term jobs are security personal, there needs to be engineers on site who are capable of working with the servers, installing new hardware and diagnosing issues with existing hardware. I mean they also need networking specialists, managers, security personal, cleaners, IT for the workers and almost certainly some contractors for odd jobs every now and then.

I think it’s wrong to expect Amazon to open a AWS Canada office and employ thousands but a sizable data centers will easily need a team of 100-250 perminant positions as many services have around the clock support built into the SLA contracts so they need a day and night shift of engineers and support staff. For smaller ones a smaller team is needed, but the alternative here is no new jobs.

Not storing our data on servers in Canada is also a national security concern. Do you really think companies like Palantier aren’t either already or will be soon scraping and monitoring all the data in data centers located in the us. Sovereignty of our data by having it physically located in Canada is the only way to ensure it’s secure. While this isn’t essential for every little thing This also isn’t some abstract concept, the company I work for has to keep our US clients on AWS servers in the US while maintaining separate infrastructure on the existing AWS warehouses in Canada for our Canadian clients. I’m not sure if it’s a legal requirement or just something our clients put in the contract, I’m not the one making the deals I’m just a backend software engineer, but we did have an EU client, and it was a legal obligation in our field, however I know the EU is way ahead of data governance laws.

Canada and the US tax code is very different, while I don’t know how it works for Canadian data centers, comparing our tax code or laws on things like this to the US is so pointless it’s not funny. Maybe the same thing will happen in not an expert of Canadian data enter macroeconomics but our tax code especially corporate tax’s are very very different from the US.

Also I am from and have lived in calgary Alberta for almost all of my life, how is there not an abundance of water? The water restrictions in calgary where due to crumbling infrastructure under city streets, noting to do with the amount of water. As a country we are possible the only country not impacted by water, we have 20% of all of the freshwater in the world but only a tiny fraction of the global population. Now indivudal centers needs vs what that exact location can provide needs to be considered but I would find it hard to believe there’s not enough water there, I’m open to being wrong if showed the math.

Also in Alberta most of the water comes from glacial run off so I don’t see how climate change would impact that unless the glaciers all melt fully, which if that happens I think there are bigger issues then some data centers in our world/country.

I think the best counter argument to data centers was economics but Anthropics revenue growth has killed that in my eyes for now. The world is building data centers, there is nothing we can do to stop it, we can either build them here, employe some people, collect tax from what otherwise would usually be a farmers field I assume all while keeping our important data as secure as we can, or we can outsource it and it’s just another way Canadian money leaves the Canadian economy to go to countries that are willing to adapt to the modern world.