Tech and business groups rally behind $142b AI opportunity report
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The news: Australian tech and business industry groups have thrown their support behind an economic report that anticipates AI could deliver $142 billion of value to the Australian economy per annum by 2030.
The research was funded by OpenAI which recently announced plans to launch an Australian office, has ramped up lobbying efforts and is committed to increasing investment in the country.
The numbers: The potential $142 billion economic windfall could come from broad-based AI adoption, developing domestic capabilities by delivering compute and AI applications, and becoming an export hub for AI training compute.
Of the value delivered to the Australian economy, the report anticipates that $112 billion would be delivered through AI adoption, $18 billion would be delivered through a domestic AI industry for data centre compute and AI software and applications.
The remaining $11 billion could be delivered from export opportunities for AI products and services like education, applications and computational power.
The context: Value is most likely to be captured in parts of the AI value chain that make use of Australia’s vast land and renewable resources as well as its startup and software industry, according to the report. This favours data centres and AI applications.
There may also be areas of opportunity “at the intersection between quantum hardware and data centres” as well as “lightweight” foundational models in areas Australia has “domain strengths” or is based on locally representative data sets.
The report found that Australia is less competitive in hardware and foundation models.
The research engaged with more than 40 stakeholders ranging from data centre companies to the Australian government.
It has been supported and produced in collaboration with the Australian Computer Society, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), the Business Council of Australia, the Council of Small Business Organisations and Women in Digital. Data centre providers AirTrunk, CDC and NextDC were also in the supporting consortium.
The source: Australia’s AI Opportunities report
