The world’s largest AI companies are getting worried.
It turns out that telling people your transformative technology will either destroy their jobs or hack critical infrastructure does not make people like your transformative technology very much.
In the United States, public frustration about the relentless pace of the AI revolution has coalesced into widespread local anger at new data centres, which have become the least popular neighbours since nuclear reactors.
In a country bitterly divided along political faultlines, data centre scepticism has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus.
Big Tech players and the Albanese government are now keeping a close eye on the extent to which that febrile opposition catches on in Australia.
In Tasmania, the IPO-bound, $15 billion Australian data centre start-up Firmus has encountered sweeping local opposition to its planned “AI factories”, based not on co-founder Oliver Curtis’ past insider trading conviction, but about energy and water usage.
Global AI giant Anthropic, meanwhile, is hiring an Australian data centre community engagement manager, a gig for someone with the right bedside manner required to calm the locals.
“Your job is to make Anthropic a trusted, visible and valued neighbour, from the earliest stages of site selection through construction and long-term operations,” the role description says.
Anthropic can be a trusted neighbour if the AI boom actually delivers the era of abundance that its true believers have been talking about. That still remains a big “if”.
Analysis released by Treasury this week suggested that AI could deliver a much-needed injection of life into Australia’s stagnant productivity rate. But for most people, productivity is a fuzzy notion. What most people understand better are interest rate rises, which Treasury also predicted could be a flow-on effect of the data centre build-out.
If you thought data centres were unpopular now, just wait until they start pushing up your mortgage repayments.
Meanwhile, the government is determined to lock in a $21 billion deal to make Australia a second home for AI giant Anthropic to train its models.
For this to work, the government needs both an immense expansion in our domestic data centre capacity, and significant public buy-in. On Thursday, this masthead reported that big artificial intelligence players had told Australia that they would build large data centres away from homes, an “early assurance” intended to head off the kind of populist anger that has roiled through the US.
The big question is whether punters can trust big tech to make good on those assurances. Tellingly, none of the companies contacted by this masthead, from frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI to hyperscalers such as Google and Microsoft, were willing to say anything on record about their plans for data centres in Australia.
One Nation has threatened to campaign against data centres, while the Greens want a moratorium on their construction. Both Labor and the Coalition are determined to reach a unity ticket on data centre construction, setting up a political fight with Pauline Hanson’s resurgent populist party.
Silicon Valley has long dismissed the data centre backlash. And like any NIMBY-ish populist panic, there is a lot of nuance lacking. There is, for example, a difference between smaller “inference” data centres, which need to be close to the critical infrastructure they support, and larger “training” data centres used to train AI models, which can be conveniently whacked in the middle of nowhere.
But the industry has reluctantly conceded that is struggling to win the public relations battle. Even OpenAI boss Sam Altman, who is such an AI enthusiast he has suggested parents use it to communicate with their children, recently conceded that “people hate data centres”.
Data centres existed long before AI. But the boom has turned them into a symbol of everything people hate and fear about the new technology. Anthropic’s public affairs team have their work cut out for them.
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Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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