Data Centres and the AI Bubble

Yea it is good we're getting AI data centres, just as long as the costs aren't socialised and profits privatised as usual

Absolutely sick to death of explaining to greens & Pocock voters why "no data centres in Australia!!" might not be the best line of thinking, thank you Jordan and team.

You have to understand that there’s data centres (day-tah, not darter, say it Frenchie!) and there’s AI data centres. The AI ones have all the GPUs in them and are probably an economy wrecker (you can’t build them fast enough for them not to become obsolete). The ones that aren’t doing compute, but are stacked full of RAM, those are handy.

The same data centres that are going to use over ten percent of our energy are NOT going to help us solve climate change. The very fact that data centres are being pushed on the world tells us what a lie the climate crisis has been. It looks more and more like the climate crisis was about centralising control of global energy than any impractical liberal ideal.

God, can you stop glazing Adelaide?? (Please don't stop)

Do data centres need cooling through water? Can we go a desalination water way that is affordable that doesn’t spoil our natural reserves?

A local Union guy also told me yesterday at the ALP meeting the data centres will have 3000 ongoing jobs that are highly skilled to maintain it.

Nice that you include references. FYI it's better to just include the DOI link for scientific articles than the full URL. The URL can and does change but the DOI is permanent.

Hey look it's Temu Felix or what ever his insta handles is xD

No mention of goatse.cx 's impact on the early internet?

My concern isn't that its just the new "Air Port", its more so the monopolization of computing parts, and the concentration of hardware in the data centers. It's that when the AI bubble burst, no one can do local computing processing anymore and have to rent from the data centers. So AI companies really are just the 21st century landlords, dictating who may or may not access compute power and how much tribute the peasants have to pay in order to do anything in a modern economy. Real serf stuff.

I'm still mostly on the Anti-AI train, because it seems more like the majority of people who like using it use it for the Plagiarism 9000 machine that it is. If it's good for medical industries, why can't we restrict it to that? But the AI laws that Labor is introducing is giving me a lot of hope that there's plenty of sense remaining to actually police and regulate this tech, at long last. Hopefully it'll be a benchmark that fellow countries follow in the future. Perhaps I'll be more on the side of AI if these new requirements help shape AI into something more sensible, but so long as the majority of people keep using it to plagiarise others and create facsimiles of "art", I can't in good conscience support it yet.

Hey Jordies, I feel that you may be downplaying just how bad the noise pollution of data centres can be. Benn Jordan has a video ("Datacentres Behaving like Acoustic Weapons") outlining the inaudible spectrum being blasted and the longer term effects on the local communities to constantly be in that environment. Hopefully the regulations and inquiry highlights the importance of proper sound treatment (across all audio spectrums), and not downplaying this could help with that. Cheers.

FJ on a fab rant re data centres here but in fact what is a great joy is how he crystallises why all other parties are grifting con artists. Such fun!

I can't stand AI, but it doesnt mean we dont need more and more data centres for everything else. We need more and more storage with every passing year

As a Computer Science student, this was basically everything I was hoping it would be. The environmental/copyright arguments against AI are really the weakest you could really make, as those problems are all easily solvable through regulation. The real problems with AI are with the businesses themselves and how poorly they're run. I'd argue that our time now would be best suited to shielding ourselves from the inevitable impacts that the circular financing in the US is going to cause by ensuring that any data centre projects here have stable funding that doesn't come from any circular sources, as well as ensuring that all new data centres have to be spun up using renewables. It's also worth noting I think that AI infrastructure isn't exactly like internet infrastructure that you can leave alone for a few decades and not worry about too much. AI processors have a far shorter shelf life in comparison primarily due to them running very intense operations 24/7. Not only do they wear out quickly, but they also become outdated quickly; data centres that are coming online now are using processors that are 2-3 years out of date, and the wait time for these processors is similar. It's not hard to envision that the massive capex in data centres going on right now could all be for nought if several of the big players can't make a stable business model out of it. On the business side of things, it is pretty terrible. In the current form of AI models, I think only Google can really afford to keep it going and integrate it into their business model, and maybe Microsoft and Meta (though I really doubt that the latter can do it). As Google is primarily actually an advertising business, it can use data it collects from it's AI customers to both train it's own models and show them more targeted ads using adsense. All the purebreed AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic, are doomed to fail because without a separate business to integrate these models into they're forced to subsidize the actual cost of their models to consumers simply because the actual cost is ridiculous. It's part of why OpenAI is trying to branch out into physical products, though that could be in jeopardy now given their lawsuit with Apple. If folks here are interested in reading more about the actual issues with AI I'd highly encourage you all to check out Ed Zitron. He's covered this field for a few years now and he's been very critical of the way that Silicon Valley's been rolling out AI (and their business practices more broadly).

I think this is a solid video but I predict that this video will get Jordan the most hate since the Alemaddines went after him. The fundamental problem with AI/data centres is the lack of social licence that they currently have which is also reflected in the increasing hatred towards big tech on the whole. I think Jordan is being way too blase about the concerns people have about them, even if they can be alarmist and misguided at times. I'll try and sum up where I think things are at in terms of people's opposition to AI and data centres more broadly: 1) Yes AI is used for good things but it's also used for some incredibly dystopian shit that enable and exacerbate the worst excesses of the techno-surveillance capitalism. As a result, people associate AI and data centres with things like flock cameras. Some people have simply made the calculation that the impacts of the bad things outweigh any predicted long term benefits that remain far from the realm of being eventuated. That strikes me as solidly rational even if it isn't always articulated very well. 2) The fact that big tech CEOs are genuinely the most ghoulish people on the planet isn't helping, even if the more medium sized companies are run by normal people. The way some of these people talk about AI causing mass layoffs with a sort of excitedly panicked glee is obviously going to turn a lot of ordinary working people off. 3) Speaking of which, as the video mentions, the AI bubble is heavily inflated and the likely financial fallout from any bursting will hurt ordinary working people the most while insulating those at the very top of the tech sector. Recessions may often be necessary economic corrections but there's no guarantee in the recovery after a recession that people will find the same stable employment they previously had, especially for a recession that is expected to be highly unequal. This is naturally fuelling a lot of anxiety among working people. 4) There is a general sense of cringe that is associated with people who use generative forms of AI. Of course, generative AI is not the only form of AI but it is arguably the most prominent in peoples' day to day lives. There's something about generative forms of AI that scream low effort, a lack of creativity and diminished critical thinking. Hell, you could argue the "we are Charlie Kirk" AI song played a role in turning his brutal murder and his entire life's legacy into a meme. And this is all before we get to all the copyright issues associated with generative AI. 5) The environmental and energy impacts may be mitigated by Labor's AI strategy but the anxiety will remain - especially with the Americanisation/internationalisation of online debates and talking points. 6) There seems to be a general pessimism towards online tech and smart technologies now as people become increasingly aware, even on a subconscious level, of the notion of enshittification (see Cory Doctorrow for a more detailed explanation).

I agree, and another important effect of allowing investment in data centres here from US companies is that we will develop a better talent pool for development of sovereign AI capabilities and for contribution to the global AI ecosystem through our own research and development that will allow us to have more of a stake when AI starts to dominate the economy. For example, last week, OpenAI needed to use a Chinese open-weights model to investigate the GPT-6 hack, as their models' safeguards wouldn't allow it. I can imagine Australia encountering scenarios in the future where a safeguarded US model may not be useable and a Chinese model may be a security risk. I think it is important that we develop our own domestic AI capabilities for such situations, even if the models are not a global state of the art and to block data centres would cause a brain drain that would make any of this much harder.

Love the references being included! Good addition. Also worth flagging that this cut seems to have some codec/playback glitches?

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I love the people screaming online that we should stop data centres. Oh the stupid hurts.

Jordan we’re drowning over here in vic. WE NEED YOUR HELP. You armed us with the arguments we needed during the 2025 election, but you’ve done nothing to help victorians back our amazing government and now we’re fucked. Start deconstructing these lies so we don’t end up losing in November

Talk about Vic Labor

Im working on the big one in Victoria that is on the news everywhere... It's a industrial estate there are literally yards of five high stacked containers next to it, and they keep recording the decibel noise of a data centre UNDER CONSTRUCTION! Go to an apartment building or hospital, building things makes noise. There are monstrous tanks being built on site to hold and treat water to use again and again, its not just sucking endless water from the mains, it's filled up and then is a closed loop. Idiocy, too many people talking about a topic they don't understand, most totally incapable of changing a tyre on their car let alone the plumbing on these jobs

I appreciate the rules that Labor has for AI regarding power generation, water usage and copyright protections. These feel less like embracing AI and data centres and more like what QLD Labor did to the Adani coal mine "Sure, you can build it but we won't pay you to do so." Which is the opposite of what most data centre hyperscalers are looking for. Which is cheap energy, no accountability and tax breaks. The demand isn't there, the funding is drying up, and the bubble is set to pop sooner rather than later. The best thing that Australia can do, is keep going ahead with the green tech future (Renewables, Hydrogen, Green Manufacturing) and ignore what ever the fuck Wall Street thinks is a good bet.

You should check out Ed Zitron

Im giving up. You're never going to cover Vic Labor. Fj is only interested in NSW and by extension federal NSW Labor.

I got environmental noise on to the platform partly because of data centres. I research physics AI for acoustics. I’m speaking to various departments about AI. Chifley tapped me on the shoulder to go on the new Labor AI taskforce. If you want info, get my number off Mislav.