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“Thirty-five years ago we were seen as the rust-bucket state – as the tariff laws came down, a lot of those industries were no longer viable and shut up shop,” he said. “I think there’s an opportunity now to have that land repurposed for data centres.” Pearson said the state currently had about 48 operational data centres, with 20 more yet to come online. These range from massive “hyperscale” facilities built by technology giants like Amazon to smaller “colocated” centres where businesses rent space. Among the most recent to be announced is a $2 billion facility in Fishermans Bend. Data centres are becoming more prolific due to the explosive growth in cloud computing and artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT. They look like large industrial warehouses – sometimes tens of thousands of square metres – and house the servers and storage needed to process and manage these vast amounts of data.
