The politics of big data officially became part of New Zealand’s election campaign<\/a> last week, after the Green Party launched a policy calling for a one-year pause<\/a> on new AI data centres.<\/p>\n It mirrors a moratorium imposed by New York state earlier in July, until the state government can finalise standards governing how massive data centres are built and run.<\/p>\n Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government has embraced the technology itself, and says that New Zealand is “a good place for data centres to be”.<\/p>\n But before we ban them or welcome them, how did we even get here?<\/p>\n What is a data centre, anyway?<\/p>\n At its most basic level, a data centre is a large, cooled building that houses racks of servers and other IT hardware.<\/p>\n “You’ve got really compact computers in there that have air-conditioning units in them, obviously the chips for processing data and then you would have storage as well,” technology writer Peter Griffin says.<\/p>\n The crucial bit is the air conditioning, he says – the intensity of the processing heats everything up. “That’s the big battle in data, is keeping everything cool.”<\/p>\n They’re also incredibly loud places. “You have to put on ear muffs [inside] because of the collective roar of not only the fans in the servers, but the air-conditioning units all around those.”<\/p>\n Some data centres are deliberately built in cooler locations, to limit the amount of artificial cooling that has to be done.<\/p>\n A $3.5b project has been approved in\u00a0Makarewa, 10 minutes north of Invercargill, with locals wanting answers.\u00a0 (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n How long have they been around?<\/p>\n Despite the surge of debate and interest in data centres, they are not a new concept. Griffin says data centres have existed in some form here in New Zealand since the 1980s, with the advent of early forms of cloud computing (basically, storing files, data and other computing services on someone else’s server and accessing them over a network or internet connection).<\/p>\n He says Telecom (now Spark) was among the first companies to set up its own data centres, followed by other large companies and services, including New Zealand Post, The Warehouse, and various government departments.<\/p>\n These ‘on-premises’ data centres are still being built – an all-of-government data centre that hosts the country’s most sensitive public data opened at Whenuapai airbase last year.<\/p>\n But as demand for cloud-computing grew, third-party companies like Datacom built larger data centres – managing the infrastructure and leasing space to companies which needed it. “As a company, you might pay to put some racks of server hardware in someone’s data centre, and you would run your applications,” Griffin says. That could include billing systems, event ticketing – anything that requires sufficiently large processing power.<\/p>\n Most recently, the likes of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been building or renting ‘hyperscale’ data centres, which provide cloud computing services to anyone who wants to pay for them. Griffin says there’s a “latency” benefit from having these locally based data centres – previously, anyone in New Zealand using AWS or a similar service was accessing their data from servers hosted in Sydney or even further afield.<\/p>\n So if they’ve existed for decades, why is everyone freaking out now?<\/p>\n The crucial differences between any of these examples, and what is being opposed in New Zealand and globally, are scale and purpose.<\/p>\n The new data centres being proposed and constructed are AI data centres – to train and run proprietary AI models. Datagrid – the large-scale data centre that’s been given permission to go ahead in Southland – is the first of these ‘AI factories’ to be constructed in New Zealand. “They’re a different sort of data centre, very much more power-hungry, water-hungry,” Griffin told RNZ recently.<\/p>\n The difference in scale to what has been built to date is enormous. The Datagrid facility will use 280 megawatts of power, which will make it the country’s second-biggest user of electricity behind T\u012bwai aluminium smelter. It also has consents to draw up to 600,000 litres of groundwater a day – similar to what a town the size of Kaik\u014dura would use – though the company says it expects to mostly use rainwater.<\/p>\n While processing is getting increasingly efficient, the rapid uptake of AI across business and society means its overall global energy use is growing.<\/p>\n Both the International Energy Agency and a United Nations research group recently published reports estimating that data centre energy use will double by 2030.<\/p>\n The other difference is purpose. Data centres in New Zealand have previously either been locally owned and run, or provided ongoing data-hosting and other services to local users. A data centre that exists purely to train an AI model doesn’t do that.<\/p>\n “That will mainly serve an international audience,” Griffin says. “It won’t serve New Zealand companies and New Zealand consumers\u2026 The government has seen that as basically a digital export.”<\/p>\n Swarbrick spoke to Q+A about the Greens’ policy to pause new AI data centres consents for a year. (Source: Q and A)<\/p>\n What’s the backlash been?<\/p>\n
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