Unsustainable – or manageable? We don’t yet know how data centres will impact Australia’s environment

The Conversation , CC BY-SA Australia’s pipeline of huge data centre projects has raised questions about how much energy and water these giant server farms will use.

These questions aren’t simple to answer because we don’t have the data.

We can’t check water or energy use for individual facilities or inspect national data centre statistics and no operator is obliged to disclose these figures.

That may change.

Last month, the National Cabinet agreed to develop mandatory national standards for large data centres, covering energy, water and land use.

The legislation is due early next year.

No detail is available, and little has been said about their lifetime environmental footprints, from land clearing to noise issues to electronic waste to greenhouse gas emissions .

These must be counted too.

The fastest way to settle arguments about the environmental impact of the data centre boom is to collect and publish the data.

Data centres have existed for decades.

But something has changed, and this essential infrastructure is now at the centre of a major policy debate.

This article is part of The Conversation’s series on data centres – what they are, why we need them, and why they’re suddenly so controversial.

Hungry for power In 2020, data centres were estimated to use about 1.5% of the world’s electricity.

But since 2022, the artificial intelligence boom has led to rapid growth.