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- [00:00]
A
So I'm next to a house on Indaway Street, Westwoodscray, and 10 metres away is the data centre. So you can probably hear some of the construction noise in the background. It's an absolutely enormous site. We can see six water cooling towers that are on the completed data center to cool down the racks and racks and racks of servers that are inside that building.
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B
That was investigative reporter Clay Lucas at
- [00:27]
C
the site of what will become a data center in Melbourne. It will, yes, store data like emails, but crucially, it will also one day provide the immense computing power needed to train and run AI models that are predicted to define the next century of the economy. I'm Samantha sellingramorris and you're listening to the Morning Edition from the Age and the City Morning Herald. Today, investigative reporter Clay Lucas on the Australians living next door to these loud, energy sucking centers that some say are a threat to our environment and whether our state governments are letting a rapidly evolving, resource intensive industry expand largely unchecked until problems become undeniable.
- [01:16]
B
Now Clay, we just heard you out at that site of a major data center in the works that's out in West Melbourne. Now we know that data centers have been around for a while, right? But we are seeing a massive explosion of them. So why is that?
- [01:31]
A
Well, they have been around for decades in one form or another. You know, we all know the computer server rooms that were in our offices from the 70s and 80s and 90s onwards that were, you know, might have been in the basement or a little side corridor, you know, that those started moving off site into what got marketed as the cloud, but was really just an off site service storage area. In 2022 though, things exploded when ChatGPT launched their AI system. And since then there's just been this incredible uptake of artificial intelligence by the wider community and that's driving a really strong demand for new computing power both, you know, internationally, in Australia, in America. This is just gone. It's sort of out of control there. And everything on our phones are starting
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B
to use AI without us even consenting to.
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D
Is it correct to say that you are in a relationship of sorts with an AI chatbot?
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B
I think that's, that's an accurate description. A teenager's death by suicide encouraged by artificial intelligence. That's what the parents of an Orange
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A
county teenager systems now to detect. AI text, AI audio, AI images, AI video. A lot of us are doing AI searches several times over the course of the day. And we now know that each of those searches is powered by a small computation done largely in a data center like the one that we visited. And it becomes clearer and clearer to all of us that these AI searches don't come at no cost to the environment, to energy, to water, and that they bring with them a real impact. I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.
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B
Do you really?
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A
But I don't know, because maybe we put them in space.
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B
Reports have shown how energy use by AI data centers that we've been talking about are potentially causing electricity prices to rise for some Americans.
- [03:30]
D
Kevin, you can lead a horse to water, but will there be enough in the trough to run one ChatGPT query? That is what some people have asked over the past year.
- [03:46]
B
Okay. And I think it'd be fair to say that many Australians do support the AI revolution, but perhaps they're not aware that this revolution requires massive, and let's just call it pretty ugly buildings that for some people are actually on their doorstep. Because not all of these data centers are built out in far flung regional sites. Right. Like some of them are popping up in metropolitan suburban areas.
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C
Why? Why is that?
- [04:09]
A
Yeah, so in, in Sydney, you've got the real focus around Macquarie park and North Ryde Lane Cove. There's a few popping up and there's scores of them sort of to the west of Parramatta in what I would guess are old industrial areas. In Melbourne, where I am, it's Brooklyn, West Foots Grey in the west, Derrimot, and then further up in the north, Craigieburn and Donnybrook. The data center operators really want them to be as close as they can to metropolitan centers, just for the speed of responses. I mean, for the sort of inferencing tasks that AI needs them to do, though it's better for them to be. But the reason data center operators are coming closer and closer to the center of town, particularly in old industrial areas, is that those areas have really great access to power lines and they have access to really, really good water sources. So new water pipes have been laid in the last couple of decades. The other less discussed reason is that to build these data centers you need a lot of construction mice and you get all those workers from metropolitan centres. So if you want to build a data centre quickly, if you're going to do it in regional New South Wales, regional Victoria, it's going to cost you a lot more in terms of manpower to build those centres.
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B
Are these data centres actually noisy once they're up and running, or is it sort of those problems aren't there anymore once they're actually up and running it just during the construction phase.
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A
So most of the residents in West Foots grey on the days when there's not construction going. They say there is a low background hum, but it's nothing like the construction and that they think they can live alongside it relatively comfortably once it's built. Good. Just one second, let me just get the dogs out of the way. There is these huge water towers on the site. There's been anytime there's a windy day. One of the residents, Jackie Glover, told us that there was suddenly this whistling noise through the water towers.
- [06:07]
E
This was supposed to be a. Apparently a children's playground and a little park here, but that never happened, so. But yeah, from an aesthetic point of view, it's not the prettiest looking thing. It's quite imposing and people often stop and go, what is it?
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A
But it's. It's probably a lesser issue once it's built than the construction process. The thing is though, that the construction is just like. I haven't seen construction on this scale other than some of the mega road and rail projects that Victoria's been doing in the last few years, like the West Footscraw one is costing 1.5 billion in total. It's being built probably eventually over 10 hectares. This is a really big site that's going to take a long time to fill in.
- [06:52]
E
I do worry about the water consumption of these places and how safe it really is living next to such a massive building. If you there was to be a major fire or so.
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A
One of the residents we interviewed was Fahd Yousef. Fahd's situation was really not great for him. He lives opposite the main entrance to the site. The noise is excessive. There's constantly light being beamed onto the site. He's had to get new curtains to block out that light. And then also even on the weekends that sometimes because, for example, on Saturday they can work from 7am and then there's a few times every other weekend they're working on Saturday and Sunday. And he just wanted to know why he couldn't get any respite from. From the building. And he wasn't at all opposed to the data center being built. There was purely the construction issues. But you know, they are going to go on for years and years, so it's not like it's just a temporary condition for him.
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B
We'll be right back. And I really want to ask you about reports about the massive energy usage and water consumption that these data centers require. There's one figure quite astonishing from Sydney Water. It estimates that in 2035, about a quarter of all Sydney's water will go towards running the data centers in that state. So does that concern you?
- [08:19]
A
It is a really striking figure with water consumption and it is a really serious concern. But the problem is that there is what is sort of referred to as phantom demand in the industry where you get all of these predictions of how much water will be used if all of these data centers are built and if they were required to be cooled on the hottest days that Australia offers. And the reality is that's probably not going to. They won't all be built. And we don't, you know, we do get a lot of hot days, but the water companies have to accommodate the worst case scenario. And so you're getting slightly hysterical concerns about how much water will be used. These centers do use huge amounts of water at the moment. The technology is progressing so that the new generation centers have these closed loop supplies that use a lot less water. The issue there is that in order to cool them, they use a lot more power. So the downside of that, they then have to increase the amount of air conditioning power they use. And that is huge. They will then say, well, we're offsetting that with renewables. The issue there is that there's not enough renewable power to power all these data centers. They might sign up agreements with renewable power operators, but if there's not enough renewables there to power them, then they're just going to go back to the grid and end up running off coal. The concerns are real. The water question is perhaps less alarming than the amount of power that they are capable of sucking out of the energy system.
- [09:58]
B
Well, I really wanted to ask you about that. Okay, so it seems like they use an incredible amount of water, but it's not like we're going to be left without enough drinking water. So that's, that's reassuring. But with regards to the power that they require, will these data centers require so much that, say we then don't have enough energy for other functions that we need? Because one of our colleagues was writing about this issue in New South Wales and he wrote that if every data center in the New South Wales planning portal is built, their combined maximum power demands in western Sydney will climb to about 4.4 gigawatts in a decade, which
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C
is equivalent to the average electricity load
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of more than 10 million households.
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C
And at their peak, they'll demand almost
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B
four times as much power as the rest of the city. So as a layperson person like me reads that and goes that doesn't sound potentially sustainable or potentially. That sounds problematic. What would you say, Clay?
- [10:51]
A
I think this comes back to the question of how many of these centres ultimately get built. I spent a lot of time talking to the CEO of Data Centres Australia. Belinda Dennett has been part of the rollout of data centres for years and years now. She points to a lot of research that shows that 6 out of 7 projected data centers don't get built, which means there is this phantom demand for power. So the electricity operators have to plan for the worst possible scenario. But really, in Australia we have a strong enough system of governance that means we're never going to get to a situation where electricity companies will just blithely give away energy that will be needed to do other things. The reason this, the topic of data centers has become such a fever pitch in America in particular, is they don't have the system of governance that we've got here that manages the system reasonably well. So you're getting these really pitch battles between people fighting over energy and residents seeing their bills go up by up to 200%. That won't happen here. The bigger question is whether the data centres can be run on renewables. And at the moment they're growing so quickly that there's no way renewable power is coming online quick enough to deal with the pace of growth of new data centers.
- [12:16]
B
And so, Clay, a big theme in all of this is, of course, the pace with which data centers are being built, obviously the fast pace with which AI is evolving. So are people just feeling a bit out of control here? Have our governments or other relevant bodies actually adequately assessed the risks that are involved?
- [12:33]
A
I think what's been happening is the AI companies and the data center operators are really well organized and they have been getting in the ears of state and federal governments, particularly the Victorian and New South Wales governments, and telling them what their needs are. And those governments are so desperate for jobs that they've been just taking their word for it and letting them run to the point where in Victoria had our economic growth and jobs Minister saying that AI should be put in a. Put on a leash and allowed to run. And it leads to a situation where these just enormous corporations with billions of billions of dollars are dictating how our cities are built based on their needs rather than the people who are affected. Like this case study we've come up, come up with in Westwood's grey, of having a data centre right on their street. You know, they're not getting a say until they suddenly start seeing the massive problems. They're seeing their footpaths dug up, their roads shut this noise going 24 7. I think politicians have just seen the jobs that are on offer from these enormous projects and all of the money that will flow into the state. And they're only just starting to realise that they again have faced serious pushback from residents who are concerned about not only the impacts on them, but the effects on the environment and the effects on the wider city.
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C
Today's episode of the Morning Edition was produced by Julia Carr Katzel. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. To listen to our episodes as soon as they drop, follow the Morning Edition on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And to stay up to date, sign up to our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a summary of the day's most important news in your inbox every morning. Links are in the show Notes. I'm Samantha Sellinger Morris. Thanks for listening.
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Sat.