Locals in the Sydney suburb of Lane Cove are concerned about the planned construction of four new data centres
The sheer size and noise of data centres are what people tend to notice first. Some say they sound like a jet plane about to take off, others complain of a high-pitched whine.
When Lucy* puts her child to bed, she hears a constant humming. "I'll hear it and think, 'What is that? What is going on?'," she says.
And then she'll remember that the noise is a data centre just 350m (0.2 miles) from her front door in the desirable suburb of Lane Cove, in Sydney's lower north-shore. Another four are in the pipeline at the local industrial park.
Australia has quickly become a global destination for data centres, with investors attracted to the country's abundance of clean energy, natural gas reserves, and land to power and house their technologies.
Earlier this year, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said Australia could become a data centre capital of the world, if it wanted to.
Australia is already headed in the direction of big tech's wishes. There are 162 data centres across the country, with plans for 90 more, and an estimated more than A$155bn (£80bn) of investment money lined up.
If approved, one of the world's biggest data centres will be built in western Sydney. At one gigawatt, it is expected to be Australia's largest single energy user.
And in Marsden Park, also in western Sydney, the biggest data centre in the Southern Hemisphere is already under construction only 100m away from a local community.
But as more Australians find themselves living next door to data centres – triggering concerns about water supplies, energy use and the environment – many are asking whether joining the artificial intelligence (AI) race is worth it.
Data centres, like this one in Lane Cove, are becoming a more familiar sight in Australia
Data centres have been essential to the digital economy since the arrival of the internet.
They were originally built to process and store data for things like emails, online banking and cloud services. But everything changed after 2022 when ChatGPT launched and AI exploded in popularity. This prompted a sudden race to build more data centres to power the technology.
The location of these large, windowless buildings filled with beeping servers and cables also became important to latency – the time it takes for data to travel from its source to its destination.
Delays for things like air traffic control, robotic surgery or even Netflix would not be tolerated today, Belinda Dennett, CEO of Data Centres Australia, says.
