Reece said city centres were increasingly becoming hubs for data centres, but also for their customers and for the firms that were developing them.
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Gallego said AI had “transformational potential, but communities need basic standards and transparency to ensure the infrastructure that supports them is developed in a way that benefits local residents”.
Sydney currently has more than double Melbourne’s data centre capacity, but the Victorian capital has a greater pipeline of planned capacity for projects where construction is yet to begin, according to real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.
Victorian Economic Growth Minister Danny Pearson told this masthead last month the state government wanted to accelerate planning processes to recruit more data centres to the state.
“I think there’s an opportunity now to have that land repurposed for data centres,” he said.
Pearson said Victoria currently had about 48 operational data centres, with 20 more yet to come online. These ranged from massive “hyperscale” facilities built by technology giants such as Amazon, to smaller “co-located” centres where businesses rent space. Among the most recent to be announced is a $2 billion facility in Fishermans Bend.
Melbourne Water last month warned that it is receiving applications from new hyperscale data centres, which use large amounts of water to cool servers, with water demands “exceeding those of nearly all top 30 non-residential customers” in the city.
In June, global tech giant Amazon Web Services announced it would increase its spending on data centres in Australia to $20 billion over the next five years, a development push that would include significantly expanding data centre “regions” in Sydney and Melbourne.