At first glance a data centre looks like a bland, boring warehouse. But these buildings, stacked with thousands of servers, are the beating heart of the internet and the booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
As data centres have grown in size and number in Australia, they have also become the subject of fierce public debate. State and federal governments, as well as the tech industry, are pushing for new data centres to be rapidly built in addition to the roughly 160 that already exist around the country.
But many local communities, from Perth to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, are pushing back. Their opposition stems from the vast amounts of water and energy data centres consume, the noise pollution they generate throughout day and night, the large tracts of land they occupy, the upward pressure they could place on inflation and power prices, and the lack of transparency and community involvement in the development process.
Against this backdrop, the Greens have called for a moratorium on the building and approval of new data centres in Australia. Sarah Hanson-Young, Greens Senator for South Australia and chair of the ongoing federal parliamentary inquiry into AI and data centres, said a moratorium was needed “until we get the regulations right”.
So should Australia pause building new data centres? We asked five experts. Three out of five said yes.
Bronwyn Cumbo, Lecturer, Transdisciplinary School, University of Technology
Yes.
Communities across Australia are raising legitimate concerns about the pace and scale of data centre expansion. We have not yet seen any systematic response from governments to these concerns, or approaches to support greater community inclusion in industry expansion.
Done well, a moratorium would provide time to develop strategic policies and planning processes that reflect the wide range of community concerns. This would support the creation of a more equitable and trusted data centre industry nationally.
But a moratorium on new data centre developments could have unintended consequences for the region.
Singapore implemented a moratorium from 2019 to 2022 to develop stronger policies around energy and water use, and has since introduced clear strategies for attracting green data centres integrated with renewable infrastructure. But instead of “greening” the industry, many developers simply shifted to other regional locations – exporting the problem to less regulated markets.
This is a global industry, and it isn’t going anywhere. A moratorium would help Australia better mitigate the social and environmental harms of data centres at home. But governments also need to do more to ensure the industry becomes more sustainable for everyone, regionally and globally.
Ehsan Noroozinejad, Senior Researcher and Sustainable Future Lead, Urban Transformations Research Centre, Western Sydney University
No.
AI is becoming core infrastructure for future economies, and Australia is already behind many developed countries in building the digital capacity needed for research, industry, government services and global competitiveness.
A temporary stop may sound safe, but it risks widening that gap. The real issue is not whether we build data centres, but how we build and operate them.
New projects should be approved only where they can show clear public benefit: clean energy supply, responsible water use, transparent environmental reporting (as the United Nations recently called for), local jobs, skills development and fair contribution to grid and infrastructure costs.
Australia should not accept a “build anywhere, consume anything” model. But nor should it pause essential digital infrastructure. The better approach is a strict public-interest test: fast-track the good projects, reject the poor ones, and make sustainability a condition of growth.
Michael Vardon, Associate Professor of Environmental Accounting, Australian National University
Yes.
A moratorium is a temporary pause, not a permanent ban, and right now we need one, because we cannot clearly see what data centres cost or deliver.
They use a lot of energy and, directly or indirectly, a lot of water. Yet they’re invisible in our national energy, water and economic accounts. The economic upside is real but easily overstated: the big productivity dividends are in the industries that use AI, often offshore, not in the centres themselves, which are capital-intensive, require imports of expensive hardware, and employ few people once built.
A brief halt on new approvals in the most stressed catchments and grids would buy time to fix the information problem. The Australian Bureau of Statistics can already collect operators’ energy, water and economic data and keep it confidential. Once we have it, the moratorium lifts.
The aim isn’t to stop the sector, but to make decisions based on measurement rather than guesswork.
Olivia Shen, Director, Strategic Technologies, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
No.
Electricity demand from data centres is rising faster than the clean energy infrastructure and transmission required to support it. This is a challenge but one that won’t be solved through a moratorium that slows down construction and investment.
Right now, companies are willing to pay a premium for data centres in locations like Australia with plentiful land and access to renewables. Their willingness to pay can help bring more renewables online and get operators to invest in sustainable technologies like battery storage and closed loop cooling that reduce water use.
A moratorium pushes those investments offshore and leaves Australia with less renewables and less digital infrastructure. Plus, it forecloses on Australia having a meaningful place in the global AI supply chain.
The data centre boom certainly needs to be managed. But calls for a moratorium are calls for perfection to be the enemy of good.
Tamika Worrell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Critical Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University
Yes.
Data centres impact Country through their extensive consumption of water, energy and minerals, as well as their vast physical footprint.
But as well as posing a risk to the environment, the current speed of data centre development poses serious risks to Indigenous rights to land and resource governance. This reflects broader global struggles for Indigenous sovereignty over land and ecosystems in settler-colonial nations.
One of the issues with most technology development is that accountability usually flows upwards. Systems are accountable to investors, companies or governments.
What is often missing is accountability to the communities whose lives are shaped by these technologies – especially Indigenous communities. Responsibility cannot stop at the point of deployment. If institutions build and use these systems, they also have to take responsibility for the social and cultural impacts that follow.
For Indigenous peoples, this means not being treated as users or data sources at the end of the process. It means being part of decision making from the beginning. It means Indigenous communities having a say in how systems are designed, what data is used, and how those systems are governed.
Drew Rooke, The Conversation.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
