Australia’s AI ambitions depend on trusted data centre infrastructure, says Data Centres Australia CEO

Well, and I want to come back and explore that, because you've been involved with two government initiatives around IT and technology and the vision for the future.

But I wanted to know, because it must have been a very busy last week for you.

The Prime Minister announced a policy on data centres, and I should imagine everybody wants your opinion and view.

How much were you able to influence that policy in a role as the CEO of Data Centres Australia?

So we've been working with the government probably for the last two years on firstly educating them around what data centres do, why they matter, why they're so critical to where we're heading, particularly with AI and digital services.

And then in this role, it really was, okay, we can see what's happening globally, this build out.

It really came, setting up Data Centres Australia was really driven by the fact that we didn't want Australia to miss this opportunity.

This is an incredible technical wave, unlike anything we've seen before, and Australia's really well placed to capture that.

But what it needed was a coordinated voice for industry and a voice to government.

So we saw in December last year, in fact, it was the week after we'd launched Data Centres Australia, that the national AI plan was released, which for the first time really had infrastructure front and center.

It was the main part of that plan.

We connected the dots.

Exactly.

And so since then we've had a strong voice into government really trying to help them understand not just the economic opportunity, but the opportunity to play a leading role in how AI is developed and influence how we build these tools that are going to impact every industry that we know.

But in some ways, AI is almost the next step in the evolution to a digital economy.

Why were we not so excited about the need for a domestic hyperscaler or domestic equipment producers? Why have data centers become more integral to that digital future rather than the stuff in the past?

I think those players really do play an incredibly important role, the hyperscalers, the platforms.

We're seeing that evolve.

We're seeing new players come into this market all the time.

But we missed some of those previous technological waves.

I think for various reasons, perhaps we didn't have the ambition, the urgency.

we didn't have the realisation of just how important those players were going to be.

And that's part of why, you know, where Dullesons Australia has been vocal on this.

This is, we don't want to look back and say, remember when this was an opportunity for Australia and we missed