Out-of-town ‘claims’

Dear Editor:

Residents deserve straight answers about the proposed AI data centre at 865 Gartshore St. in Fergus, and so far, we’re getting the opposite.

At the recent town hall in Waterloo, Spur Innovation representatives told the room the facility would be capped at 10 megawatts (MW), with no expansion planned. This is not in line with what their own earlier materials said. Documented project roadmaps and factsheets describe a Phase 1 of 25 to 35MW, scaling to 50 to 75MW, and eventually 300MW. Which number are we supposed to believe?

The cooling story has shifted just as sharply. Spur originally marketed a closed-loop system using the site’s existing pond that would be efficient and quiet. At the town hall, that plan was dropped entirely in favor of a 100% air-cooled system.

Developers insist this won’t be noisy at the property line, even at 100MW-plus, but the sound demo they offered was of a 5MW facility that’s still liquid-cooled (as per their website) – not the air-cooled system actually being proposed. Industrial air cooling at that scale runs on banks of exhaust fans and chillers – that’s not quiet.

Then there’s the environmental claim. The Fergus site has documented historical contamination with polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs). Developers offered only verbal assurance that the site has already been remediated to provincial standards – no documentation has been provided to back this up. As of September 2026, there’s no Record of Site Condition on file with the Ontario Environmental Site Registry confirming this. A verbal assurance is not proof of a completed cleanup.

Three separate claims on power capacity, cooling methods and site remediation have each changed between what was documented and what was said out loud, and none has been backed with binding specifics.

Before Centre Wellington council votes on a data centre moratorium residents should demand written, verifiable commitments, not verbal reassurance at a Q&A held outside of town.

Chris Musgrave,
Fergus