They underpin cloud computing, banking, telecommunications, government services, healthcare, research, business systems and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. They will also be important to Australia’s sovereign digital capability. Australia cannot sensibly depend entirely on computing infrastructure located overseas. So, the question is no longer whether Australia should build data centres.

There are good reasons why data centres cluster in and around cities. They need fibre networks, skilled workers, strong power connections, enterprise customers and low-latency links to users. For some workloads, proximity matters. Financial services, critical systems, cloud connectivity and real-time AI inference can all benefit from being close to major population and business centres. But the disadvantages are becoming harder to ignore.