$3.5B AI Data Centre Rumour Has Oakville Residents Split

A vacant field in north Oakville has become the center of a heated local debate, and the town itself is still catching up to the news. A possible $3.5 billion AI data centre project has residents on social media split between excitement and alarm, even though the Town of Oakville says no formal development application has actually been submitted, according to Oakville News's reporting on the situation.

The rumour started when a real estate listing identified a 25-acre vacant site at 3480 Ninth Line as the target location for HIVE BUZZ HPC's proposed AI "gigafactory," a facility the company had only previously described as being located somewhere between Toronto and Waterloo when it announced the project in May.

According to HIVE BUZZ HPC, which describes itself as building "the industrial infrastructure of the intelligence economy," the proposed 320-megawatt facility would house more than 100,000 GPUs at full build-out, create more than 800 construction jobs and hundreds of permanent skilled positions, and become one of Canada's largest AI computing facilities, according to Data Center Dynamics' coverage of the original May announcement. The company's framing leans heavily into sovereignty language: "Compute is the new sovereignty. Countries that own the machines will write the future. Countries that rent compute from data centers abroad will not contain sensitive data within their borders."

The site's location carries symbolic weight for the company too. HIVE executive chairman Frank Holmes noted the location sits between the University of Toronto and Vector Institute to the east and Waterloo to the west, framing it as building sovereign infrastructure between the institutions that produced deep learning's foundational research, a history we've covered in detail in our piece on Canada's AI research heritage and Anthropic's own recent investment in that same research ecosystem.

Residents on Oakville Facebook groups have split sharply over the proposal. Some celebrated the potential jobs and economic boost, while others raised concerns about the project's electricity demand, water consumption, and possible noise impacts, according to Oakville News's follow-up reporting on the town's response. Oakville Mayor Rob Burton has since directed town staff to prepare a formal report on data centres and AI infrastructure, due to council by August 10, examining planning approvals, environmental impacts, and municipal policy considerations.

This regulatory scramble mirrors a pattern we've tracked extensively across Canada, including in our coverage of Toronto and Hamilton's own zoning struggles and Alberta's public reckoning with Meta's massive data centre investment. Municipalities keep finding themselves reacting to AI infrastructure proposals after public attention forces the issue, rather than having policy frameworks ready in advance.

In my four years in sales at a research and advisory firm, I heard directly from CMOs and CEOs about what they wanted from AI, and the physical infrastructure question rarely came up in those conversations, even though it's increasingly the actual bottleneck determining how fast AI capacity can scale. For businesses evaluating AI infrastructure investments or partnerships in Canada, Oakville's situation is a reminder that municipal-level regulatory uncertainty can meaningfully delay or reshape projects, regardless of how much capital or technical planning has already gone into them.

A rumoured $3.5 billion AI data centre in north Oakville has residents debating its potential benefits and risks after a real estate listing identified a specific site, though no formal development application has been submitted. HIVE BUZZ HPC's proposed 320-megawatt facility would house more than 100,000 GPUs and create over 800 construction jobs. Oakville's mayor has ordered a staff report on data centre regulation, due to council by August 10.