Datacentres are a ticking time bomb. We must make sure AI’s benefits outweigh the costs | Nicki Hutley
Publish Date: 2026-07-08 11:01:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
The two great existential threats of our time – the climate crisis and AI – come hurtling together in the explosion of datacentres across Australia and around the world.
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.
And that’s before we get to the implications of artificial intelligence itself – to me, both inspiring and terrifying – which is the primary driver of the datacentre boom.
Worldwide, there are more than 10,000 active datacentres, with this number expected to increase by 3.5 times at an estimated cost of US$7tn. For perspective, that’s a little over 5% of the entire world’s annual GDP – we are talking big bickies. The US hosts most of these centres but Australia is attracting activity, with 286 active or planned centres and global AI leaders including Anthropic looking to Australia as a potential training ground for its models.
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 – perhaps from Fomo on the alleged benefits or from fear of upsetting the billionaire tech bros, or both.
Governments and proponents of datacentres often refer to them as “infrastructure”, which certainly sounds like something we need. But they are neither so-called “hard” infrastructure (think roads, telecommunications or power and water) nor “soft” 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.
There’s no doubt that AI can benefit humankind – and I…
