Documents: Slate met with feds to discuss 800MW hyperscale plans in November 2025
Presentation by the asset manager pitched Hamilton as an 'AI Growth Zone'
The Scoop
Newly-released documents, obtained by Blunder Valley via Access to Information request, show that in late 2025, Slate Asset Management briefed Canada's federal government on its plans to construct up to an "estimated" 800MW of hyperscale AI data centre capacity on Hamilton's waterfront.
In March 2026, Slate applied to sever a portion of the former Stelco land, hoping to accelerate their development timeline. The application stated the request was being made due to "immediate demand" for development that "may contain hyperscale and enterprise data centres."
The land severance was denied on June 4th due to widespread community outrage. Slate's appeal at the Ontario Land Tribunal will be underway as of next month.
In July, Hamilton City Council voted against an Interim Control By-Law that would have placed a 1-year moratorium on AI datacentre development, in a sudden reversal after previously supporting a moratorium. Mayor Andrea Horwath, along with most city councillors, have publicly said they do not want hyperscale data centres to be built in Hamilton. Several have since implied they do not believe Slate intends to build them.
But Slate, as the newly-obtained documents show, has privately briefed the federal government on its plans for as much as 800MW of data-centre capacity at its "Steelport" site on the waterfront.
Emails show that in November 2025, Slate set up a meeting to brief multiple high-level officials from Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada on its "proposal to host the National AI Sovereign Compute Facility" along with something they call the "Canadian Centre of Excellence for Datacentre Technologies."
The former likely refers to a ~20MW federally-funded "research" data centre that Slate has proposed to build in partnership with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC), a federally-funded non-profit. The latter is a phrase that Blunder Valley has been unable to turn up results for in web searches.
What Slate presented to the Canadian government, however, went far beyond this.
The slide deck from the meeting, included in the document cache, suggests Slate's partnership to build the DRAC data centre may represent something of a Trojan Horse for much larger AI data-centre goals.
The presentation reads, "[t]he Federal supercomputer will act as a catalyst for Steelport, drawing additional information focused research and development organizations, and establishing Hamilton as a Canadian Al Growth Zone."
The term "AI Growth Zone" is not typically used in Canada, but has been used in the UK to describe government-supported AI data centre complexes 500MW or greater in size. The phrase is repeated multiple times in Slate's deck.
The presentation also contains a small infographic titled "Key Data Centre Highlights" which claims the site will have "400+ MW power availability in near future" and "800 MW estimated power capacity at full scale." The graphic touts the site's low-latency fibre-optic connections to the Toronto market, as well as the 700 acres available for development.
One of Slate's slides points to a favourable policy environment at both the federal and Ontario levels of government, writing, "[r]ecent policy announcements indicate strong government support at all levels, with significant power capacity expansion commitments producing a conducive environment for a data centre development."
In recent weeks, multiple Ontario municipalities have passed Interim Control By-Laws to restrict AI data centre development. Hamilton has not.
Ontario's municipal elections are being held on October 26, 2026.
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