AI Datacentres

The rapid expansion of AI compute and hyperscale datacentres is creating new infrastructure decisions for municipalities, communities, and institutions. Existing planning and governance frameworks were not designed for this scale, speed, or complexity.

Services

Supporting municipalities and communities navigating high-impact digital infrastructure decisions.

My goal is to empower and support the municipalities to decide whether an AI datacentre proposal serves the public interest, or whether it should be paused, refused, or sent for further review.

Danuma™ supports decision-makers with independent analysis and governance frameworks.

Strategic Briefings & Workshops Infrastructure Decision-Making

For councils, leadership teams, institutions, and organisations seeking a deeper understanding of emerging infrastructure governance challenges. Topics may include:

  • The governance implications of AI infrastructure across different levels of governments
  • Infrastructure decision-making under uncertainty
  • Designing accountable systems for emerging technologies
  • Moving from reactive regulation to anticipatory governance

NOTE: AI Policy, AI Governance and Compute Governance are not a part of this service function.

Municipal Datacentre Framework

  • Framework Design with end-to-end process from proposal intake to future-proof policy recommendations with an impact forecast.
  • Systemic or Intersectional SWOT Analysis to review existing policy and regulatory landscape – land-use, planning and zoning accountability considerations with recommended decision pathways.
  • Accountability, Legibility and Transparency Analysis (ALTA) to ensure community benefit conditions, environmental and infrastructure impact considerations, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms
  • Infra Dependency Mapping to map hidden dependencies, risk exposure, digital concentration, CI risk and chokepoints.
  • Policy and Regulatory Analysis focused on emerging policy challenges, including:
    • Interim Control By-law reviews
    • Legislative impact analysis
    • Governance risk assessments
    • Stakeholder and decision-maker briefings

Systems Mapping

  • Conditions Mapping to identify enabling conditions, structural constraints, governance assumptions, invisible dependencies.
  • Institutional Governance Ecosystem Mapping to connect actors, influence, accountability, decision pathways, structural relationships and visualise institutions, power, coordination, fragmentation.

AI Infrastructure Analysis

For communities, institutions, and organizations seeking independent analysis of complex infrastructure proposals.

  • Dependency Analysis to map interconnected pressure between energy, grid, water consumption, ecological pressures, and supply-chain dependencies.
  • Infrastructure Dependency Mapping to map hidden dependencies, risk exposure, digital concentration, sovereignty claims, CI risk and chokepoints.
  • Hybrid Risk Analysis to analyse intersections between cybersecurity, geopolitics, infrastructure, governance, operational resilience.

Resources

  1. NEW – AI Data Centre FAQ & Glossary [PDF]
  2. NEW – AI Data Centres – Ontario Specific [PDF]
  3. Datacentres, Concerns, Public Disclosures & Ontario Bill 40 [PDF]
  4. Risk-to-Policy Memo: City of Hamilton’s Interim Control By-law For Datacentre Development [PDF] [https://zenodo.org/records/21250126]
  5. Climate Fast‘s Say No to AI Datacentres.
  6. Dr. Anne Pasek’s Getting Into Fights With Datacentres Zine Framework.

Everyone walking the face of this planet, has a role to play in what comes next.