Did you know there has been a data centre operating in the Quinte region for several years?
According to the President of All Season Fencing Moshe Yitzhak, there has been zero public complaints about it.
“It is an outdoor data centre, eight megawatts,” says Yitzhak. “It began operation in 2023. We shut it down at the end of last year (2025) or the very beginning of this year (2026), when we began discussing a new data centre inside the plant.”
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The data centre located at 920 Trenton Frankford Road
Where is All Season Fencing? The former Sonoco Paper Mill in Glen Miller (Quinte West), the former manufacturing plant that once employed 300 people in the region.
It closed in 2020.
All Season Fencing purchased the 100 acre property in 2022 and currently employs about 40 people (peak season).
They create PVC fencing, cladding, decking, and railing systems.
In this Quinte News exclusive, we break down how the property has been retrofitted and how it could soon be employing hundreds of people.
The could is because it may come down to a council decision this coming Wednesday.
Our conversation involves Yitzhak, Vincent Paquet, the Co-Founder of FirstBlock, and Mike Faddoul with Trinity Smart Farms.
We have told you already about All Season Fencing.
FirstBlock designs, builds, and operates data centres.
Paquet says they specialize in decentralized data centres.
“That are used as a heating source for heat off-takers. So, the heat off-taker can be a multi-residential building, it can be a greenhouse, it can be a pulp and paper mill, or it can be a district heating that is supplying heat to a whole downtown area.”
Data centres create heat and Paquet says the company began five years ago, looking for a way of utilizing that heat.
“Right from the start we were interested in heat recovery, because in Quebec there’s a lot of pressure on environmental issues. It was about how do we reuse that energy twice?”
Small data centres are actually inside residential buildings in Quebec. The heat from the data centres is used within the building.
“We targeted condo towers of 100 units and more, and we would put small data centers directly in their building and would help them go from gas boilers to electrical boiler, our servers being the electrical boiler.”
FirstBlock has received a letter of support from the Minister of Government Transformation, Public Services and Procurement Joel Lightbound.
In December 2025 they also received the support of Mayor Jim Harrison
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There are 30 heat recovery projects the company operates across Quebec.
About two years, the company decided to focus on larger “heat off-takers”(a sister company called Heat Connect Services).
So now we asked what is the process in which a data centre creates hot water and what can be done with that hot water.
The process is called “Direct to chip liquid cooling”.
The system uses liquid-cooled plates attached directly to computer chips to absorb heat, generating hot water that passes through a heat exchanger to supply thermal energy to the building.
Excess heat is then routed through chillers in a completely closed-loop process, where the same water continuously recirculates.
Onto the site itself.
It is already compliant with zoning according to the City of QW Planning Department.
“It was a pulp and paper mill before, which used twice the power (electricity) that we are planning to consume and was also producing a lot of noise.”
The 18-megawatt data centre would be able to recover 15-megawatts (approximately) for thermal energy which would be used for a vertical farm.
There is already a Hydro One substation on site and Paquet says they are also compliant under noise level regulations.
Both All Season Fencing and FirstBlock tell Quinte News they will not be using water from the Trent River but purchasing water through a Quinte West company.
The heat that is captured by First Block/Heat Connect Services will be used to produce produce.
No, that is not a typo, we mean produce as in vegetables.
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Photo taken from Trinity Farm website
The company is called Trinity Smart Farms and they will operate a vertical farm inside the plant.
Mike Faddoul is the Head of Strategy for the company and says vertical farming produces crops year-round.
The benefits are it recycles 96-per cent of the water it uses and does not use pesticides, while keeping food grown local and year around.
According to Faddoul, a vertical farm (21 feet high) produces 1,074 times more produce than a traditional Canadian farmers field.
Faddoul says they have also signed on with an unnamed company to purchase 100-per cent of their crop.
What does the farm plan for employment?
“34,000 square feet is phase one in Trenton, that’s about 50 people employed. When we go to phase two in Trenton, which is 160,000 square feet, we can get to 174 direct jobs.”
That job count does not include All Season Fencing or the data centre, or First Block/Heat Connect Services.
The property already pays six figures to the city in taxes and that number would likely grow exponentially, along with development charges for new greenhouses that Yitzhak believes could be over $2-million.
Moshe Yitzhak (All Season Fencing) says they were supposed to break ground this week, however a motion coming to QW City Council next week could quash the entire project.
Paquet and Yitzak tell Quinte News that concern over the data centre proposal at 7 Riverside Drive could kill their project. THAT STORY HERE
Vincent Paquet.
“For a year and a half, we’ve been told we can just follow the process with the city planning and usually, you don’t announce a project before it’s approved because the city feels like we would be forcing their hands if we would get so much support from the population. So, we just followed the normal process. Then recently, another data centre had a public hearing, and that went really bad for them. Then this by-law was put in front of the council, and that was in a span of two weeks. So now, all of a sudden, we spent a year and a half with the city, and now two weeks to have to present our project and defend it publicly, because we’re facing extinction of our project.”
Quinte West CAO Chris Angelo says staff received the full submission from the property owners on September 9 and are still reviewing the package.
We asked Yitzak what has been invested in the property to this point.
“We’re at the range of way over $10 million already in that facility here. Hundreds and thousands of hours already of man hours between professionals, lawyers, corporations, people. There is money that transfer hand, and leases that have been signed, and the investment is in the range of millions again.”
Yitzak says he is concerned that there could be lawsuits.
“Probably will end up in tsunami of lawsuits for all the agreement and leases that we signed with our partners, based on the promise and the approval of the mayor and the city staff to this point.”
Both men believe there is a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding of their project.
They include other data centre projects and concern over artificial intelligence, not necessarily data storage.
Paquet says the federal government is looking to bring Canadians data north of the border, but regardless of the decision of council Wednesday, data will be stored somewhere.
“It could be in a 1,000-megawatt data centre in Texas that is consuming water and not reusing the heat, and that the data is controlled by Trump or whoever else will be elected in the future, or it could be in Canada where we have at least a say in how we do things.”
Councillor Egerton Boyce’s motion would propose the municipality place a temporary, ban (for up to one year) on approving or building any new data centres or AI facilities, while staff work with the province on regulations controlling the centres.
Prior to the vote Wednesday, the Quinte West Chamber of Commerce has announced a meeting for members to discuss the particular project. Monday October 5 from 5:30-8:00 p.m. at Occasions by the Bay.
The following evening there is a public open house at All Season Fencing (920 Trenton Frankford Road), Tuesday, October 6, 5:30-8:00 p.m.
Citizens looking to learn more are invited to walk the mill with the companies and ask questions. No registration is needed.
On Wednesday evening at council there are nine deputations expected on data centres in the community.
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An overflow Quinte West Council chambers at the QW Planning meeting Thursday September 17, 2026. Residents expressed concern about data centres, including water useage, pollution, noise/frequency pollution and hydro draw.
The agenda for the council meet can be seen by CLICKING HERE
