The two great existential threats of our time \u2013 the climate crisis and AI \u2013 come hurtling together in the explosion of datacentres across Australia and around the world.<\/p>\n
You can hardly avoid hearing about them these days, either with awed reverence of the promised benefits to humankind or with fear and anger given the implications for the climate, inflation, jobs and even housing affordability.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s before we get to the implications of artificial intelligence itself \u2013 to me, both inspiring and terrifying \u2013 which is the primary driver of the datacentre boom.<\/p>\n
Worldwide, there are more than 10,000 active datacentres<\/a>, with this number expected to increase by 3.5 times at an estimated cost of US$7tn<\/a>. For perspective, that\u2019s a little over 5% of the entire world\u2019s annual GDP<\/a> \u2013 we are talking big bickies. The US hosts most of these centres but Australia is attracting activity, with 286 active or planned centres<\/a> and global AI leaders including Anthropic looking to Australia<\/a> as a potential training ground for its models.<\/p>\n The economic, environmental and social consequences of this datacentre investment boom are profound. Yet governments here and around the world are, by and large, taking a laissez-faire approach \u2013 perhaps from Fomo on the alleged benefits or from fear of upsetting the billionaire tech bros, or both.<\/p>\n Governments and proponents of datacentres often refer to them as \u201cinfrastructure\u201d, which certainly sounds like something we need. But they are neither so-called \u201chard\u201d infrastructure (think roads, telecommunications or power and water) nor \u201csoft\u201d infrastructure (healthcare or education). Unlike roads or education, it is unclear who is benefiting from all this investment (aside from the tech bros) or how. If we are going to call datacentres infrastructure, they should have to face examination as to whether their benefits outweigh the costs, just as any other projects would.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no doubt that AI can benefit humankind \u2013 and I don\u2019t mean getting help designing your travel itinerary or anti-tax meme<\/a>. In Shanghai, it\u2019s relieving congestion<\/a>; around the world it\u2019s improving diagnosis accuracy and speed<\/a> for X-ray, CT, MRI and other imaging; and it is helping optimise energy grids<\/a> to avoid blackouts. The potential economic and social benefits are enormous. But we cannot look at these benefits without assessing the costs.<\/p>\n And those potential costs are large. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has written to banks<\/a> to warn of the accelerating cybersecurity risk posed by AI. Its recommendation, without any irony, is to use AI tools to help prevent the AI threat.<\/p>\n It is by now fairly well-known that datacentres use huge amounts of energy and water. Datacentres in Australia are expected to triple our consumption<\/a> of both by 2030. At a time when our best answer to the climate crisis is to electrify as fast as possible<\/a> using renewable energy and storage, allowing these energy vampires to strain grids could slow the transition to net zero emissions<\/a> \u2013 and add to energy costs<\/a> for everyday consumers.<\/p>\n While fossil fuels still power about half our energy demand, we will be adding huge amounts of polluting greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Alarmingly, Queensland says it\u2019s happy to keep using fossil fuels for datacentres<\/a>, resisting the federal government\u2019s \u201cexpectations\u201d. Any cost-benefit analysis must include the collective impact of datacentre emissions.<\/p>\n Waste heat from datacentres is also a significant problem: intense energy going in turns into heat. While this might be useful in cold climates such as Finland, where the waste heat is used to heat homes<\/a>, in most parts Australia we are already facing more days of extreme heat as the planet warms<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of the potential to boost economic growth and employment, while the datacentre boom has lifted business investment<\/a> off the floor over the last year, most of the equipment must be imported. This means that the direct effect of the investment on the size of our economic pie is close to zero. Beyond the construction phase, datacentres do not create many jobs \u2013 far less<\/a> than other sectors such as manufacturing.<\/p>\n When Australian politicians or industry proponents talk about the benefits of datacentres, they are really talking about the possible benefits of the AI that they enable, and especially the productivity gains<\/a> AI is expected to drive, whatever the size and timing of these might be. In a speech to the Australian Business Economists<\/a> in February, the assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy, Andrew Charlton, noted that Australia was now at a crossroad. From here, we could continue to be a \u201ctechnology taker\u201d, with some productivity benefits, or we could become \u201ca world-class adopter and creator and exporter of AI technology\u201d. Australia\u2019s poor past record on commercialising our ideas<\/a> and keeping the profits at home suggests the better option will also be much harder.<\/p>\n Charlton also said the government should ensure \u201cthat technology works for the Australian people, and not the other way around\u201d. Looking at the datacentre and AI landscape and their associated costs, it has not succeeded.<\/p>\n Nicki Hutley is a consulting economist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The two great existential threats of our time \u2013 the climate crisis and AI \u2013 come hurtling together…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-788743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}