In 2025, award-winning journalist Karen Hao released Empire of AI, a New York Times bestselling book that seemed to give the anti-AI movement the smoking gun it had been looking for. Buried inside its pages was a statistic so dramatic it practically sold the book on its own: a proposed data center in a small Chilean town was projected to consume more than a thousand times the amount of water needed to sustain the town itself. Imagine that for a moment. A single industrial facility arriving in a quiet community and drinking a thousand years’ worth of the town’s future…

Here is a humanized and expanded summary of the announcement, broken into six comprehensive paragraphs. — Imagine the piercing wail of a fire alarm splitting the silence of a quiet residential street in Beaver Bank at 3 a.m., only to discover it was triggered by a slightly burnt piece of toast. Or picture the flashing lights of a police cruiser pulling up to a commercial building on the outskirts of Halifax, summoned by a motion sensor disturbed by a stray cat. For the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), these scenarios are not just minor annoyances; they are a persistent, expensive, and…