On a Wednesday at the end of July, Mississauga's council did something no other city in Ontario had done. It voted unanimously to start a pause on new AI data centres. Mayor Carolyn Parrish put the reason in one plain sentence: "We don't know what data centres are gonna do to our communities." Two weeks earlier, Hamilton's council had voted 10 to 6 against a one-year pause of its own, and the room booed.
Council told staff to review the city's planning rules and prepare an interim control bylaw, a freeze of up to one year that can be extended by a second, while the city works out how to define and regulate these buildings. Right now its zoning doesn't even have a word for them. They get filed under warehousing.
A data centre moratorium is exactly that kind of pause. A municipality stops approving new server facilities for a set time so planners can study the power, water and land they need, and write rules before the concrete is poured.
When you ask an AI model to check the spelling on a parish letter, it feels weightless. You type a sentence, the screen blinks, and you move on with your morning. It feels as if the work happened nowhere at all.
That feeling is an illusion. Every answer comes from a building somewhere, full of chips, copper, cooling pipes and a very large electricity bill.
I spent the first fifteen years of my working life as a software engineer. API integrations, distributed systems, chasing memory leaks in code running on machines I never saw. Then I spent fifteen years as a pastor. Hospital rooms, funeral planning, budget meetings where three elders debated whether the church furnace would make it through another January.
Engineers are taught to treat physical limits as problems waiting for an optimization patch. Pastors live inside those limits every day, with people who get thirsty, pay hydro bills and bury their parents.
So when a council stops to ask questions before saying yes, I don't hear panic. I hear stewardship.
The bill coming due at the meter
The International Energy Agency's 2025 report Energy and AI estimates that data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, around 1.5 percent of all the electricity used in the world. Its central projection has that more than doubling, to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. That's slightly more than all of Japan uses today.
Two honest caveats before anyone quotes that. It's a projection, and the IEA publishes higher and lower cases around it. And not every one of those terawatt-hours is AI; data centres also run email, banking and the video you watched last night. But AI is the fastest-growing part of the load, and it's the reason so many of these buildings are being proposed at once.
Power is only half the ledger. The other half is water.
Chips packed this tightly get hot, and many facilities cool them by letting water evaporate. A 2021 study in Environmental Research Letters, which mapped the footprint of data centres across the United States, found that about one-fifth of the direct water footprint of their servers comes from watersheds that are moderately to highly water-stressed. That's American data from 2018, so treat it as a sign of the pattern rather than a measurement of your township. The pattern is the point: these buildings tend to land where water is already tight.
Augustine wrote that a brief but true definition of virtue is "the order of love" (City of God, Book 15, chapter 22). A thing, he said, "is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately." Computing isn't evil. But when a community spends down its water and its grid capacity before anyone has asked what it's for, the love is out of order. A pause is how you put it back in order.
We use these buildings too
I should say plainly where I stand. At ChurchWiseAI we build AI tools for churches, including a phone assistant that answers when the office is closed. Those tools run in data centres like the ones these councils are debating. I'm not writing from outside the building.
That's exactly why I think a pause is reasonable. A church phone assistant or a sermon transcript uses a sliver of what these new campuses are being built for. Most of the boom is a race among a handful of very large companies to build ever bigger models and win enterprise customers. A council asking for rules first doesn't switch off the tools churches already use. It asks the people building the next wave to show their work.
What a pause gives back
A moratorium isn't an argument for unplugging the router. It's the practical choice to set the rules before the concrete cures. A year gives a council time to put three plain standards in place.
First, closed-loop cooling. It can be done. The company behind the project that started Mississauga's debate, Prologis, said its building would use a closed-loop water system needing about 2,000 litres a day after an initial fill. If it can be done there, it can be the rule everywhere, rather than evaporating drinking water.
Second, bring your own power. If a campus needs as much electricity as a small city, the builder should help pay for the new supply rather than leaving homes and farms to compete with it at peak hours.
Third, no secret deals. The people who drink the water and pay the hydro bills should be able to read the water and power studies before council votes.
None of that is anti-technology. It's the same thing a church board does when it asks for the furnace quote in writing. Limits aren't the enemy of faithful living. They're the fence that keeps the pasture green.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI data centre moratorium?
It's a temporary pause, set by a municipality or region, on approving new data centres. In Ontario, Mississauga's council moved in July 2026 to use an interim control bylaw: up to one year, extendable by one more, while staff study how to define and regulate these facilities.
Will a pause on new data centres stop our church from using AI tools?
No. A moratorium stops new buildings from being approved in one place. It doesn't switch off the data centres that already run the tools churches use today, like phone assistants, transcription and website chat.
Why do data centres use so much water?
Their chips produce a lot of heat in a small space. Many facilities cool them by evaporating water, which is cheaper than sealed systems. Closed-loop systems that reuse the same water exist, and some new projects use them.
How does Christian stewardship apply to data centres?
Stewardship means caring for creation and for our neighbours. When a new facility would draw heavily on a community's water or power, asking for clear rules, honest numbers and public studies before saying yes is part of loving those neighbours well.
Sources
- Energy and AI, Executive summary, International Energy Agency, 2025
- Siddik, Shehabi and Marston, "The environmental footprint of data centers in the United States", Environmental Research Letters, 2021
- Mississauga becomes first Ontario city to pause new AI data centres, The Pointer, July 30, 2026
- Council recap: July 29, 2026, City of Mississauga
- Hamilton city council rejects one-year pause on AI data centres, CTV News, July 15, 2026
- Augustine, City of God, Book 15, chapter 22, New Advent