Data Centre Fever

“Australia is in the midst of a feverish data centre boom” – Greenpeace report: Energy Vampires  

There are currently at least 162 data centres in Australia. There are 90 more being proposed, which are contentious not just because of their number but because of their much, much larger scale. The latest generation of AI-branded data centres are projected to use 400 times more energy than the earlier, Internet cloud-oriented ones (see graph below).

It is important to note that none of these new hyperscale data centres has yet to see the light of day in Australia, and there is fierce local resistance to their development wherever they are being proposed. This local resistance takes its facts and its impetus from the unprecedented growth within, and corresponding opposition to, the data centre industry around the world. The global call for a moratorium on new builds sees a wide and socially diverse consensus of voices weighing in on the insanity of planning to burn more fossil fuels because tech profits said to, habitat destruction, lack of transparency in the development process bordering on outright deceit, the technology industry’s shell companies arrogantly bypassing existing zoning laws, deadly chemical and noise pollution, increased cost of living due to increases in power and water demand, no local jobs, no local advantages.

In order to function at all, the AI data centre proposed for Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales will have its own brand new on-site 700MW natural gas power station directly adjacent residential areas. The massive AI-branded data centre at Swanbank in Ipswich will annually consume more power than the rest of Ipswich combined and create the equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions of over 200,000 petrol cars. The Beetaloo Energy data centre in the Northern Territory will be the equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions of one million petrol cars. If left unregulated, the carbon emissions of the coming data centres will be equivalent to many millions of petrol cars (see Climate Council link below graph for more information on this).

The Prime Minister delivered a much anticipated speech on the 15th of July about setting up social “guardrails” around new data centre construction, which at the moment generally falls under local council zoning regulations. There are no zoning laws – Federal, state or municipal – tailored to the extraordinary scale of this boom (the Swanbank data centre application has been approved to be assessed as a “warehouse” under “superseded” 2006 Ipswich City Council planning laws).

The Prime Minister’s speech contained a vague and impossibly idyllic list of goals with exactly zero enforcement detail. The speech seems only to have emboldened the fossil fuel/tech industries and spurred the governments of Queensland and the Northern Territory to belligerently reject the notion of any data centre regulation at all.

The data centre boom threatens to derail or significantly delay any energy transition away from burning fossil fuels in this country. (Assistant Data Minister Andrew Charlton recently said that “data centre developers could invest in gas plants where necessary”). Fossil fuel corporations are key players in the data centre lobby groups and have joined their aims to the aims of the technology industry: Growth at any cost. The plan is to continue fracking gas (as in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Sub-basin, or even create new natural gas power stations as in Moss Vale) so that the U.S.-based technology industry can profit from its overleveraged and over-hyped AI products before the AI bubble bursts, leaving behind only poisoned ruins.

The failure of the Federal Government to provide any policy clarity or leadership around this issue and the speed at which AI-branded data centres are being proposed justify the widespread call for an immediate moratorium on new builds until meaningful regulations and restraints are in place.

Get active and have your say:

Local campaign against the Swanbank centre

Petition for No data centres in Ipswich - protect our water, wildlife & community

Stop the data AI centre developments in Qld

Stop the data drain – Senate submission (Getup)

(Further references to support specific claims in this article are available upon request).