{"id":870803,"date":"2026-08-27T23:46:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T23:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/870803\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T23:46:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T23:46:13","slug":"australia-in-a-sliding-doors-moment-to-determine-who-reaps-rewards-of-ai-boom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/870803\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia in a ‘sliding doors’ moment to determine who reaps rewards of AI boom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Sampson had to take his Australian artificial intelligence (AI) startup overseas before customers at home would take it seriously.<\/p>\n

For Michael Gately, scaling up his AI company from Australia has meant competing in a global scramble for expensive and increasingly sought-after computing power.<\/p>\n

Both chief executives have found ways around these business constraints. Still, their experiences highlight the challenges Australia faces as it tries to capture more of the economic gains from AI.<\/p>\n

Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton has declared Australia is at a “sliding doors” moment to ensure the country becomes a “creator” rather than a “renter” of AI.<\/p>\n

The nation’s AI startups agree and want Australia to leverage its advantage as an attractive destination for data centres to negotiate guaranteed and affordable access to computing power.<\/p>\n

\"NEXTDC<\/p>\n

Australian companies are reliant on the small number of businesses that control the world’s advanced computing capacity, generated by electricity-hungry data centres. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

How Australia can get a ‘return’ for hosting data centres<\/p>\n

Australian companies currently are heavily reliant on the small number of tech businesses that control the world’s advanced computing capacity.<\/p>\n

That capacity is generated by large electricity-hungry data centres. Australia has become a very attractive place to host<\/a> these centres.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The federal government is in the process of developing national standards to govern the approval of data centre projects, which have increasingly attracted community backlash.<\/p>\n

Working with states and territories, the government will establish rules around their location and their use of electricity and water.<\/a><\/p>\n

Once built, data centres employ relatively few people directly, which means simply hosting them does not guarantee Australia a large share of the economic benefits they enable.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The federal government has unveiled a new “Buy Australian AI Partnership” to help local AI companies win customers. (ABC News: Supplied)<\/p>\n

But Mr Charlton has argued Australia does have the bargaining power to dictate better terms.<\/p>\n

“If you want to build a data centre in Australia, you should be prepared to make some of that compute available to Australian businesses, researchers and startups,” he said in a speech this month.<\/p>\n

Mr Charlton said this would ensure Australia got a greater “return” from the AI boom.<\/p>\n

Australian companies urged to buy local AI technology<\/p>\n

Computing power is not the only hurdle, however, with many Australian AI startups struggling to find domestic buyers to support their companies.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, the federal government unveiled a new “Buy Australian AI Partnership” backed by the nation’s Big Four banks to help local AI companies win customers.<\/p>\n

Mr Charlton said the more than 1,500 Australian AI companies were already building “world-class” technology, but the challenge was getting in front of the organisations that could buy their product.<\/p>\n

“We are in a sliding doors moment for Australia’s AI industry,” he said.<\/p>\n

Behind the energy brawl everyone wants the data centre boom<\/a><\/p>\n

As is so often the case in Australia, the politics came down to a fight over energy.<\/p>\n

“As the importance of this technology grows, we need to ensure Australia is a creator and not just renter of AI.”<\/p>\n

The difficulty convincing Australian businesses to buy local AI products is well known to the Tiliter co-chief executive Mr Sampson, whose company creates vision software widely used by retailers, including for self-checkouts.<\/p>\n

He said it took proving his technology in international markets to get “validity” back in Australia.<\/p>\n

“Fortunately, I had a German co-founder, which gave us access to that market,” Mr Sampson told the ABC.<\/p>\n

“If I didn’t, I’m not sure I would have taken that step.<\/p>\n

“So I do wonder how many great Australian companies get stifled because they just can’t get over that threshold in the early days in the Australian market.”<\/p>\n

Mr Sampson said there must be “leadership and risk taking” at a corporate level.<\/p>\n

“If we’re willing to back Australian companies, we do have capability here that we can unlock,” he said.<\/p>\n

Australia at risk of being ‘squeezed out’ of AI race<\/p>\n

The Buy Australian AI partnership is an initiative of startup accelerator Stone & Chalk, with chief executive Stela Solar saying it is key to helping local tech companies succeed.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Stela Solar is behind the initiative to encourage more Australian companies to buy local AI technology. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

“Australian enterprises really need to lean in a little bit more and open the door to Australian innovation,” she told the ABC.<\/p>\n

Local companies are developing tools for medical diagnosis, speech and image recognition, agriculture, mining, finance and retail uses.<\/p>\n

Along with encouraging more Australian businesses to purchase these tools, Ms Solar said it was critical the government worked to secure domestic computing power for startups to grow.<\/p>\n

“If we don’t secure compute capability for homegrown technologies, we actually risk being squeezed out of the very sovereign AI foundations that we’re building here,” she said.<\/p>\n

“That means while we might experience productivity gains from AI, we won’t gain from the wealth growth that AI is bringing because that will land in other countries.”<\/p>\n

Ms Solar, who has previously worked for tech giants in the US, said there was also a need for deeper investment, research and development partnerships between major tech players and Australian startups.<\/p>\n

“Australia can sometimes be treated like a sales office, and that’s something with the data centre wave we actually have every chance to reshape,” she said.<\/p>\n

Australian-owned technology key to solving AI ‘trust issue’<\/p>\n

It is a sentiment shared by Mr Gately, who is the chief executive of Trellis Data, an AI firm based in Canberra.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Michael Gately says securing affordable access to computing power will be a game changer for Australia. (Supplied)<\/p>\n

Mr Gately said the computing power his company needs can take months to secure, while its price can change by as much as 50 per cent in the space of a week.<\/p>\n

“Given the amount of investment that Australia is accepting from the US tech suppliers, such as Nvidia or Dell, we should provision a ‘set aside’ for Australian companies to be able to have price certainty for a period of time,” he said.<\/p>\n

Mr Gately said Australia’s negotiating position was particularly strong due to the backlash of the poorly managed rollout of data centres in the US.<\/p>\n

He said there was clearly a “very big trust issue” with AI at the moment and believed establishing a strong Australian industry was key to gaining community support.<\/p>\n

“There is a substantial fear among Australians broadly around AI,” he said.<\/p>\n

“They definitely know they need to use it. And those who know there’s a future of massive benefit are very pro Australia having its own capability in this space.”<\/p>\n

Mr Gately said he often found people were relieved to learn Australia was producing globally competitive AI models.<\/p>\n

“I think people go, ‘Well, thank goodness for that, that someone is out there able to compete,'” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christopher Sampson had to take his Australian artificial intelligence (AI) startup overseas before customers at home would take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":870804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[256,254,64,63,257,10166,44],"class_list":["post-870803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-computing","tag-data-centre","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/870804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}