Toronto company eyes building AI data centre on Hamilton’s shores

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Good evening and thank you for joining us. Hamilton has long been an attractive location for businesses to set up shop, but a new kind of industry is headed to the Steel City.

[00:00:09]>> And it's just one possible destination.

[00:00:11]As Adam Atkinson explains, Hamilton could soon be home to AI data centers.

[00:00:20]A company out of Toronto called Slate Asset Management owns 800 acres of land along Hamilton's industrial waterfront.

[00:00:27]And they have big plans for the area including the Steel Port project, a world-class AI advanced manufacturing and clean infrastructure district connecting rail, road, and water in the historic Port of Hamilton, according to the Steel Port website.

[00:00:41]>> They're looking to, their words not mine, create a uh new manufacturing research uh campus that uh gives new life to the former Stelco lands.

[00:00:57]That would also include uh public realm.

[00:01:00]>> There are a few renderings of what Slate Asset Management says the area could look like. Environment Hamilton's Ian Borsuk says he has attended meetings and information sessions about the project.

[00:01:10]>> They would be mostly used for research purposes is what we're being told. So, universities like McMaster or elsewhere would be able to use it.

[00:01:17]Um and we also know because it's on the Stelco lands, so Slate is technically Stelco's landlord in some ways, they would actually be using a lot of the permits that Stelco's actually had access to.

[00:01:28]>> Borsuk says he knows of plans for a small data center, but that only covers some of the 800 acres of land that needs remediation.

[00:01:35]>> Right now, we're only talking about a very small portion of it. And we know that if that first data center goes through, which is relatively small, there are interests in building out something much bigger that would require significantly more electricity, would use up a lot more water, and and so on and so forth.

[00:01:53]>> The scope and scale of future projects is also a concern for a Ward 3 Councillor Nrinder Nann.

[00:01:58]>> That's legitimate grounds for concern in a water usage. We've seen, you know, stories, horror stories coming out of the United States of an entire water body being completely drained by large-scale corporate hyper-scale data centers.

[00:02:13]>> For now, Environment Hamilton is confident that whatever is built here won't be as concerning as other much larger AI data centers proposed in Utah and Alberta. But they still have a lot of questions. Slate Asset Management wasn't available to talk today.

[00:02:29]Adam Atkinson, CHCH News, Hamilton.