Protest planned against AI data centre on north coast as MP accuses objectors of 'howling at the moon'
A protest is planned against the potential creation of an “AI campus” at a north coast business park.
People Before Profit has issued the call for the demonstration on Saturday, citing “empty prominses” about jobs at such centres, plus environmental and ethical concerns about AI generally.
DUP MP for East Londonderry Gregory Campbell has in turn accused the party of “just howling at the moon” over the issue.
The Prescient Data Centre has operated since 2018 at the Atlantic Link Enterprise Campus.
This is a new council-run business park next to both the council offices and the University of Ulster in Coleraine, and boasts of being 1km away from where the EXA Infrastructure North fibreoptic cable linking North America to the UK makes landfall.
Its operators have previously described it as “the biggest and only purpose-built data centre in Northern Ireland, proudly running on 100% renewable energy”.
The centre has now been acquired by Swiss firm Eryce and, according to the firm Armason, which brokered the deal, the new owners have the capacity to grow the site “into a full AI campus”.
People Before Profit’s East Derry Branch has said it understands the new owners “intend to massively ramp up the operations, pushing for an AI-focused ‘hyperscale’ data centre on the current site”.
It is calling for a demonstration at the council offices on Portstewart Road in Coleraine at 3pm on Saturday, “to coincide with an international European day of action on data centres”.
Its objections to the expansion of the site are several.
It says "the promises of job creation with these projects are nothing but empty promises”, that the energy which an expanded centre would use “could be used to power new homes” instead, and said that the area “has already suffered greatly from the toxic algae crisis at Lough Neagh – the last thing our environment needs is another threat like data centres”.
It added that “an argument can be made that the energy use of these centres has contributed in no small part, to the rise in energy prices”.
And on AI in general, the party branch said “AI tools have been used for everything from generating disgusting images for perverts to ‘generating’ new targets for the IDF”, and that AI “has been shown to lower the critical thinking of its users”.
Aontu, the socially-conservative republican party, has also objected to the expansion.
Mr Campbell said that the Atlantic Link site is underused and has enjoyed little investment.
It was therefore strange for People Before Profit to complain about the lack of jobs afforded by the expansion of the data centre.
"I don’t recall having seen or heard them arrange a protest in the past 10 years [about the fact] there’s been hardly any jobs on the site,” he said.
"There just haven’t been any, depite efforts to create jobs and bring inward investors there to join…
"So it sounds to me like a falsified rationale for a protest.
"I think it’d be better if all of us were to unite in trying to make sure that site becomes more productive, offers more employment to local people on the ground, and I’d have thought the vast majority of local people would welcome that rather than protesting [about jobs] now when there was no protest previously.”
Mr Campbell went on to add “I don’t know if it’s them being Luddites, but I think there’s a case of People Before Profit’s entire rationale of course being to rail and protest against any business that might generate profit, even if it offers employment opportunities”.
He added: "They have have this old-style socialist mantra that any business that potentially makes a profit has to be bad.
"I suspect that’s what they think this is, and therefore they have to organise a protest without thinking ‘well we have to do something with the site because it hasn’t really been very productive up to now’ – which most local people would say is a better idea than protesting and just howling at the moon, which is what it will be.”
Armason has said it is “not involved with the project on an ongoing basis”.
No response had been received from Eryce at time of writing.