When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to the G7 Summit in Canada in mid-June he took a detour to Seattle, the home of the US tech behemoth Amazon.
While Albanese couldn’t secure a one-on-one meeting with US President Trump, Amazon was happy to roll out the red carpet for him.
Albanese was there to talk about data centres and Amazon’s ongoing billion-dollar investment in Australian ones.
Tech companies like Amazon are building data centres around the world to meet the increasing demand for computing power and storage, driven by AI, the widespread adoption of cloud computing and the military use of computers.
This process is also driven by the ratcheting-up of tensions with China by Western imperialist countries, including Australia.
Well connected
The virtual world of the internet depends on massive data centres in the real world. In 2024 Australia was one of the top five data centre hubs in the world.
There are currently 261 data centres in Australia, with 151 operators. Sydney has 88, Melbourne 52, Brisbane 23, Perth 21, Canberra 20 and Adelaide 19, with the rest spread across regional Australia.
As a US Data Centre website says, “Australia is well connected to South East Asia, primarily via locations such as Hong Kong and Singapore.”
A Financial Review article asked, “What does it say about Australia’s future when energy hungry data centre owners replace old-fashioned industrial manufacturers?” The answer is that Australia’s rulers welcome the investment.
In an earlier article, the bosses’ paper noted the cost of boosting electricity production to meet the growing needs of data centres.
They account for about 5 per cent of Australia’s total electricity consumption. That will increase to 8 per cent in 2030, with some estimating as high as 15 per cent.
A growing proportion of energy use is for mining cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin alone uses as much power as Poland. Up to 2.3 per cent of US energy goes to the crypto craze, much of it produced by fossil fuels that worsen global warming.
In addition, the ABC picked up on the high use of Melbourne’s water by data centres.
In the western suburbs alone, 19 new applications for water for data centres will use the same amount of water as 330,000 people.
On top of that, the computers and servers that support the cloud are produced using carcinogenic materials and create millions of tonnes of e-waste.
Crowd-sourcing
Meeting with Albanese, Amazon’s Iain Rouse said his company had been in Australia for a decade and “was in the for the long haul with this partnership”.
“In the last decade, we’ve invested $9.1 billion into Australia. And we’ve committed a further $13.2 billion worth of investment through 2027.” That’s a total of $22.3 billion over 12 years.
The ABC gushed over the company’s expansion in Australia. “Amazon already plans to open new data centres in Sydney and Melbourne and is building a $2 billion cloud-based storage system to handle top-secret data for Australian military and spy agencies.”
But the process will produce few well-paying jobs. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a labour crowd-sourcing site, means much labour will be recruited outside any kind of regulation, creating digital sweatshops where piecework is offered at the lowest possible rates.
The environmental and labour issues raised by data centres are not causing Australia’s rulers any real concern. Even the likes of Paul Keating, Bob Carr, Doug Cameron or Rex Patrick, who condemn the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal as a loss of sovereignty, are silent.
This is because the $22.3 billion being invested in Australia saves local bosses from making the costly investment while increasing the high-tech leverage that Australia’s rulers will enjoy.
The Australian ruling class has always encouraged foreign investment while investing, at current figures, $3.8 trillion overseas. The drive for data centres is no exception.
By Tom Orsag
