Oct 29, 2026 · 29 min · 10 segments
Data centres have become a singular point of focus for community concerns about the future. But they are also the subject of massive government FOMO. The past year has been a wild ride for Data…
Belinda DennettGuest
James RileyHost
right oh very cool there's a lot of people who would kill for that job of course but if you outgrow it you outgrow it okay so let's get into newsy type stories firstly the firmest IPO but in the last week or so next DC's share price which I gather is based on it's a stocked work on a couple of projects that it had undertaken in Victoria and Now, I've been reading that was because it couldn't access power or there were some delays in accessing energy for those projects.
So it looks like the market is deciding something about data centers in the short term.
But how do you view this in the longer term, bigger ambitions that Australia says that it has?
We have always said where government policy, energy availability and speed to market line up is where the investment will flow.
And so our calls to government is we need to make sure, and this is not unique to Australia, every country is grappling with energy, energy transition, the energy required for the digital economy.
We're playing catch up to that because suddenly we've got this new requirement that has been underestimated.
Government policy is Australia is perhaps disadvantaged to some markets because we have a federated system.
So we have state level laws, we have the federal laws now that they're trying to work out.
I think it's important to distinguish those events that you've talked about from some overall decision being made on the market.
Investors don't invest at any cost and that's something we've been keen to point out to the government as some of the proposals around investment New taxes, new levies, new contribution funds.
We knew the cumulative impact of all of those measures put a price, a cost on building in Australia.
And that has to be competitive as to where this investment could go elsewhere.
And I've long talked about the companies in Australia who've been building data centres for 15, 20 years, proven delivery long before anyone was paying any attention or thought it was cool.
Delivering critical infrastructure with all of that entails ensuring you've got almost 100% uptime, the most sensitive data being stored.
We've got companies founded in this country that do that and have been doing that for a long time and have delivered through all sorts of challenges.
right oh very cool there's a lot of people who would kill for that job of course but if you outgrow it you outgrow it okay so let's get into newsy type stories firstly the firmest IPO but in the last week or so next DC's share price which I gather is based on it's a stocked work on a couple of projects that it had undertaken in Victoria and Now, I've been reading that was because it couldn't access power or there were some delays in accessing energy for those projects.
So it looks like the market is deciding something about data centers in the short term.
But how do you view this in the longer term, bigger ambitions that Australia says that it has?
We have always said where government policy, energy availability and speed to market line up is where the investment will flow.
And so our calls to government is we need to make sure, and this is not unique to Australia, every country is grappling with energy, energy transition, the energy required for the digital economy.
We're playing catch up to that because suddenly we've got this new requirement that has been underestimated.
Government policy is Australia is perhaps disadvantaged to some markets because we have a federated system.
So we have state level laws, we have the federal laws now that they're trying to work out.
I think it's important to distinguish those events that you've talked about from some overall decision being made on the market.
Investors don't invest at any cost and that's something we've been keen to point out to the government as some of the proposals around investment New taxes, new levies, new contribution funds.
We knew the cumulative impact of all of those measures put a price, a cost on building in Australia.
And that has to be competitive as to where this investment could go elsewhere.
And I've long talked about the companies in Australia who've been building data centres for 15, 20 years, proven delivery long before anyone was paying any attention or thought it was cool.
Delivering critical infrastructure with all of that entails ensuring you've got almost 100% uptime, the most sensitive data being stored.
We've got companies founded in this country that do that and have been doing that for a long time and have delivered through all sorts of challenges.
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