Boon or boondoggle? N.S. weighs $10B data centre’s promised economic benefits

HALIFAX – Living more than 200 kilometres from the site of a major artificial intelligence data centre proposal isn’t stopping Michael McCluskey from voicing his opposition to the project.

The retired military veteran and training professional from Dartmouth, N.S., has added his name to a Change.org petition that has already collected more than 18,000 signatures since the project was announced last Friday.

Anthropic, an American AI company, plans to lease the Point Tupper, N.S., site for its first Canadian data centre, the first major AI facility to be publicly proposed in Nova Scotia. 

However, McCluskey said he just views it as the latest in a long history of Nova Scotia chasing grand economic development projects that never seem to deliver.

He said the site won’t be able to serve any other purpose if Anthropic walks away, and he’s worried the province will be left holding the bag when economic benefits don’t appear.

“They don’t put (data centres) anywhere that’s prospering,” McCluskey said in an interview. 

“They don’t put them in San Francisco. They don’t put them in Los Angeles …. What they’re looking for are disadvantaged, economically desperate areas?”

EverWind plans to build the 18,600-square-metre data centre by late 2027 and lease it for 20 years to Anthropic under undisclosed financial terms. San Francisco-based Anthropic says Canada is the sixth-largest worldwide user of its Claude AI model, which is driving the project. 

EverWind calls the data centre the biggest private investment in provincial history. It originally planned to build a wind-powered hydrogen plant exporting energy from its Cape Breton marine terminal. The company said it’s still pursuing this hydrogen project.

The proposal has thrust Nova Scotia into a debate that has exploded across Canada in recent months as massive AI corporations race to build computing capacity in areas with enough electricity and water to feed the resource-gobbling sector. 

The facilities can range in size from a micro data centre about the size of a refrigerator to a hyperscale campus that consumes a level of power comparable to a small city.

A recent York University report found that Canada’s existing 194 data centres have a combined capacity to draw 1.6 gigawatts of electricity. More than 14-times that amount — about 22.7 gigawatts — are either under construction or in the announcement stage across 213 sites. 

The proposals are supersized. Existing data centres have an average capacity of about 11 megawatts and cover an average of 0.05 square-kilometres, about the size of six Canadian football fields. New proposals average about 122 megawatts spread over more than eight square kilometres, almost 1,000 football fields. 

York researchers say a 122-megawatt operation will use the same amount of power annually as 49,000 to 78,000 Canadian homes. 

EverWind’s data centre will be 95 megawatts in the first phase, and the company has plans for a 325-megawatt expansion by mid-2028. 

Paris Marx, a Newfoundland and Labrador-based tech critic and author of “Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires,” said data centre opposition is forming quickly in Canada because communities have seen U.S. headlines about skyrocketing power rates and water consumption over the last 18 to 24 months.

He said if the EverWind project moves ahead, he expects it will follow a global trend where the costs to communities are higher than first projected. 

“The benefits just aren’t there to the degree that we expect,” he said in an interview. 

“There are not a lot of jobs that are associated with data centres beyond the construction phase. Obviously, we need to employ people to build them. They don’t employ a ton of people to actually run them.”

EverWind expects to create 2,000 jobs during construction and 215 permanent jobs between the data centre and the four wind farms that will eventually power it.

The salaries for the permanent jobs would range between $135,000 and $185,000 per year, the company said, with about half of those jobs in the data centre and half in the wind farms.

Sean Mullin, with the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, said data centres may not create the same amount of jobs as something like an auto factory, but even a couple hundred positions can make a big difference in a small community. 

“We’d rather have that economic activity here than somewhere else. And then that also benefits the country in the sense that we have more compute capacity to serve the rest of the country,” he said in an interview. 

Kody Blois, a Nova Scotia MP and parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, said at EverWind’s announcement last week that AI is transforming the global economy and Ottawa wants to seize the opportunity.

“These are really important jobs right here in the region. They matter to families, they matter to communities,” he said.

EverWind CEO Trent Vichie said there were already more than 20 Nova Scotian contractors working on the site and economic spinoffs will multiply the direct benefits. 

“More people in restaurants, more people buying from local businesses,” he said last Friday. “It’s really providing an anchor to strengthening the community that’s already here today.”

Marx said he doubts the project will actually proceed, saying data centres are seen as a backup at the moment when other projects, such as hydrogen, fail to gain traction. He noted EverWind has already hit roadblocks a planned hydrogen project in Newfoundland. 

EverWind said in an email that it’s participating in an auction to sell hydrogen to Europe and that the data centre adds a major industrial use for its renewable energy portfolio and infrastructure while the international hydrogen market develops. 

“The data centre helps maintain investment momentum in wind, transmission and shared infrastructure that can also support hydrogen and ammonia over time,” the company said.

“While these investments complement each other, they are not dependent on one another.” 

Anthropic lost more than US$80 billion during the first half of 2026, according to Reuters. That’s up from a US$13-billion loss in the first half of 2025. The company is planning an initial public offering of shares as early as November that could value the company at US$1.5 trillion. 

The firm declined an interview request this week but has told investors that its plan to spend $518 billion on AI infrastructure over the next decade is needed because computing power is the key constraint on AI development. It has said future demand for AI systems is expected to exceed available supply, according to Reuters.

CEO Dario Amodei and the company’s five other co-founders established Anthropic as a public benefit corporation, a designation that for-profit companies select to balance financial goals and social impact.

The company has also committed to setting aside five per cent of its shares to a public benefit fund which will grow along with Anthropic’s valuation.

The fund will explore large donations to non-profits or direct distributions to specific populations. The company says it has already committed US$200 million to studying and addressing potential impacts of AI technology on the labour market.

But Marx remains skeptical about whether AI companies have a good business model.

“I think that there are also a lot of market questions as to whether something like this will even be necessary, or if a client like Anthropic will actually show up,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 23, 2026.

— With files from The Associated Press