The ‘invisible problem’ industry sees in Labor’s green data centre plan
The peak body for the local data centre industry has pushed back against the government’s “strange” data centre plan, which will require hyperscalers to contribute to the energy transition.
The inaugural national principles for AI data centres unveiled by the Albanese government on Monday failed to address the vast “invisible” energy usage by individual office servers, according to the head of Australia’s peak body for data centres.
“I think the reason they’ve omitted it is because it’s invisible,” Data Centres Australia co-founder and CEO Belinda Dennett told Capital Brief.
“You can ignore it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there. It doesn’t mean it’s not using our energy resources. The single most energy efficient thing the government could do is move their own on-premises workloads into a data centre.”
The national principles set out the government’s expectations of data centres and AI infrastructure developers. The five principles include asking companies to “make a positive contribution to Australia’s energy transition” and use water “sustainably and responsibly”.
