Protesters Oppose Proposed AI Data Centres in Vancouver

Hundreds of people marched from the Vancouver Art Gallery to City Hall on June 27, 2026, in what National Observer reported was part of a coordinated national day of action, with organizer Guerric Hache saying demonstrations were held the same day in 13 other cities across BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and New Brunswick. It was the second Vancouver march in two months: a first protest on May 23 drew roughly 750 people, according to the Vancouver Sun and Daily Hive. The group behind both marches, No AI Vancouver, was founded by 18-year-old university student Torin LaRocque. Organizers say a Change.org petition opposing the data centres had reached nearly 14,000 signatures by June 22 and about 15,000 by the time of the second march, per CityNews.

The protests target a Telus-led project developed with the federal government and Westbank under Ottawa's Enabling Large-Scale Sovereign AI Data Centres initiative. Per The Tyee's reporting, which cited Telus and BC Hydro spokespeople, the buildout spans three sites: an existing facility in Kamloops, a Mount Pleasant site (the former Hootsuite headquarters) expected online by the end of 2026, and a downtown Vancouver site at 150 West Georgia St. planned for 2029. Telus says the three sites will draw 85 megawatts initially and scale to 150 megawatts and more than 60,000 GPUs by 2032, and has told Daily Hive it expects the investment to add $9 billion to the Canadian economy. The company says the facilities will use closed-loop liquid cooling, cutting water use by 90 percent versus a conventional data centre, and will route waste heat into Vancouver's Neighbourhood Energy Utility and Creative Energy's district system.

Two friction points recur across the reporting and are broadly applicable to siting decisions elsewhere: first, vague or narrowly framed public notices (Vancouver's rezoning materials listed the Mount Pleasant site only as "Bulk Data Storage," according to National Observer, leaving residents unaware of the project's true scale until Telus's own announcement) can undercut trust even when a formal comment process exists; second, quantified sustainability claims, such as Telus's water- and energy-efficiency figures, do not by themselves resolve concerns tied to a specific local constraint, in this case Metro Vancouver's Stage 3 water restrictions. Teams planning regional capacity should expect community and council scrutiny to focus on grid load, water draw relative to local supply conditions, and the clarity of early public disclosures, not just headline efficiency metrics.

Vancouver's Mount Pleasant rezoning application is under review and is expected to go before city council in July, when the public will get another opportunity to speak, according to the city's statement to National Observer. Vancouver Coun. Sean Orr has publicly questioned who would pay for grid upgrades and whether the facilities represent the best use of the city's limited land. Beyond Vancouver, similar fights are underway in Alberta (Olds, near a proposed gas-powered Synapse facility) and Saskatchewan (a proposed Bell hyperscale project near Regina), and the Council of Canadians has published an organizing toolkit aimed at other communities facing comparable proposals.