Editorial Team
8 min read
No AI Vancouver’s July 26 rally follows City Council’s withdrawal of a public-hearing referral for Telus and Westbank’s Mount Pleasant data centre. The pause leaves land use unresolved, but TELUS says it has secured the cluster’s initial 85 MW; the key test is now what conditions and evidence the next municipal process can require.
No AI Vancouver, a grassroots campaign formed after TELUS announced its proposed B.C. sovereign-AI infrastructure network, planned a stationary rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery at 1 p.m. on Sunday, July 26. The event arrives after Vancouver City Council withdrew its earlier referral of the M3 rezoning application at 111 East 5th Ave. and 2060 Quebec St. to a July 23 public hearing. A report on the decision says Council cited unusually high interest and concern that it would not have enough time to hear registered speakers.
That is a meaningful political delay, not a rejection of the project. It does, however, expose a limit in the movement’s immediate demand for a pause: the proposed cluster’s initial electricity service is already on a different track from the next municipal hearing.
The contested M3 site is one component of a proposed three-facility network. TELUS, the Canadian telecommunications company led by president and chief executive Darren Entwistle, is developing it with Vancouver developer Westbank: an expansion of an existing Kamloops data centre, M3 in Mount Pleasant, and a second Vancouver facility at 150 West Georgia. TELUS opened its first Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Quebec, in September 2025 and says it is sold out; that prior deployment is central to the company’s argument that Canadian customers want domestic AI compute.
In its May announcement, the company said M3 would open at the end of 2026 and scale through 2028, the West Georgia facility would come online in 2029, and the cluster would exceed 150 MW by 2032. It also projected more than 60,000 GPUs, about $9 billion in B.C. economic value, more than 1,000 construction jobs and hundreds of operations roles. Those are TELUS’s forward-looking projections, not completed capacity, employment or economic output.
M3 itself would substantially renovate a six-storey office building built in 1977 in Westbank’s Main Alley campus, a building that previously housed a significant part of Hootsuite’s headquarters. The 150 West Georgia proposal is a separate development near BC Place. Treating the controversy as a vote on one building misses the system TELUS is proposing; treating it as a decision on the entire cluster misses the City’s narrower land-use authority.
No AI Vancouver organizer Guerric Haché said the group wants Council to pause hyperscale development until there is a regulatory framework for impact management, democratic participation and community benefit. The group’s own July newsletter had announced July 26 and a further protest on Aug. 29. The later event account said the July gathering would prioritize speakers, participant connections and next steps over marching, with parents associated with PACES and labour leaders from IATSE 891 among those expected to speak.
The date deserves care. Another inherited event report describes the gathering as Sunday, July 25, a calendar mismatch; the campaign newsletter and the other event report both identify Sunday, July 26. Its other figures are similarly advocacy-linked: Haché estimated 500 to 700 participants in May and 1,000 to 1,200 in June, while a petition started by Simon Fraser University student Grace Barrett had nearly 17,500 signatures when the report was published. Neither is an independent count.
TELUS company-reported capacity: an initial 85 MW secured from BC Hydro and planned cluster capacity of more than 150 MW by 2032. Source: TELUS media release.
The most decision-relevant number is 85 MW, a measure of power capacity rather than annual electricity use. TELUS says it has secured that initial clean, renewable capacity from BC Hydro for the three sites. Reporting that cites BC Hydro says the utility confirmed it had secured the project’s initial power draw and that the centres would be charged standard commercial or industrial rates.
That changes how to read British Columbia’s new rules. The province requires prospective AI and data-centre projects to use a competitive selection process for access to clean electricity. Its January release says projects are assessed on price and economic, community, data-sovereignty and environmental benefits, with up to 400 MW targeted for AI and data centres in the first two years. The allocation is a maximum target across projects, not a comparison of the project’s current 85 MW with household consumption or a guarantee for TELUS.
But the framework has an important exception. Projects that had reached specified stages in BC Hydro’s interconnection queue can continue through the prior process. The same account quotes Susie Rieder, a BC Hydro spokesperson, as saying the three TELUS projects have existing arrangements and would not need to compete unless they sought additional power. Rieder said any expansion beyond already secured electricity was not guaranteed and would likely compete with other proposals; the report says new bidders face a floor of 10% above the standard industrial transmission rate.
The distinction limits both sides’ shorthand. The campaign is right that electricity allocation is a public-policy question, but the provincial competition is not necessarily a stop button for the initial service TELUS says it has secured. TELUS’s 150-MW 2032 target, on the other hand, is a company forecast that exceeds the initial 85 MW and would depend on conditions beyond the existing arrangement.
TELUS says its closed-loop liquid cooling would use 90% less water and 80% less cooling energy than traditional data centres. It also says the Vancouver facilities would integrate with district-energy systems and use recovered heat to heat the equivalent of 150,000 homes. These are comparisons against an unspecified "traditional data centre," and claims about a proposed design—not operating measurements from M3.
There is more concrete infrastructure behind part of the heat-recovery case. The reporting says M3 is expected to integrate with the City-owned False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility, which heats 47 buildings and homes for more than 10,000 residents. The City told the report that adding the data centre could help the utility expand while limiting reliance on natural gas. That is different from proof that the facility will deliver TELUS’s full homes-equivalent claim, or from a disclosed operating plan for the Kamloops site.
The opposing water number is not a measured baseline either. Barrett’s petition estimates the Mount Pleasant facility could consume 55,000 to 70,000 litres a day for cooling. The petition offers an estimate, while TELUS supplies percentage reductions; the two figures use different bases and cannot establish actual M3 consumption. The detailed account adds one relevant company estimate: at full scale, TELUS estimated 300 million litres of annual water savings, implying annual consumption of more than 33 million litres under the stated 90% reduction. That remains a TELUS estimate and is not a site-specific meter reading.
Noise is another unresolved local question. TELUS told the report its facilities were being designed with soundproofing and acoustic engineering to prevent noise pollution as far as possible, but the available material gives no expected M3 noise level. A later hearing record would need comparable design specifications, operating assumptions and enforceable conditions rather than only general sustainability claims.
Federal interest is based on sovereign compute: infrastructure in Canada, under Canadian law and jurisdiction, for Canadian researchers, companies, public institutions and government organizations. Evan Solomon, the federal minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, announced the May expansion with Entwistle; his office told the detailed account that Ottawa was discussing TELUS’s proposal because it could advance that domestic capacity.
The federal intake process sought Canadian proposals with planned capacity above 100 MW and a broad range of Canadian clients. It lists economic and ecosystem benefit, Indigenous participation, sovereignty, energy, performance, readiness and project cost and structure as criteria, and says selection is competitive. TELUS’s planned 150-MW scale would meet the size threshold if built, but it does not establish selection or funding.
As of the May report, the federal government had not agreed terms or amounts to fund, finance or invest in the TELUS project; it was discussing TELUS and proponents of about 160 other projects. That gap matters more than the announcement’s rhetoric. A federal program can favour Canadian control and large capacity without deciding how much public money this cluster receives, or what a Vancouver rezoning should require.
Council’s next action will determine whether the pause becomes a fuller local review or only a rescheduled decision. The available reports provide no new hearing date. Before it returns, the public record needs to separate three questions that are often being collapsed:
That evidence would not resolve the political argument over generative AI or the project’s best use of land. It would allow Council and residents to decide M3 on more than untested design claims and broad fears—and make clear which objections the City can actually address.
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