As Bell Canada builds a massive artificial intelligence data centre in the RM of Sherwood, Saskatoon city council is wondering - could Saskatoon have one of its own one day? After posing the question, City of Saskatoon staff are now advising Saskatoon’s city council to spend limited time exploring large scale data centres until someone actually comes forward to build one. Following a request from councillor Scott Ford, city administration spent the last three months trying to figure out what a data centre would mean for Saskatoon. With the large amount of land needed for a large data centre to fuel AI, the city doesn’t think a company will want to build one within city limits. The administration says the city could look at spending $200K dollars to scan other cities and create new bylaws - or spend half a million dollars on a comprehensive study that could take up to 18 months to finish. “It was more about if we don’t feel if it’s going to come, and data centers aren’t going to be built in Saskatoon, then why would we spend the money, taxpayers’ money, to do an additional report,” explained Ford. There are currently two smaller-scale SaskTel data centres operating in Saskatoon. The data centre study will now move to city budget deliberations at the end of the month. CTV News, CP24 and BNN Bloomberg are divisions of Bell Media, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of BCE Inc. With files from Keenan Sorokan
