For every $100 in data centres, $80 leaves Australia almost immediately

April 6, 2026 — 2:18pm

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There’s a number the data centre industry doesn’t love talking about. For every $100 poured into a fully loaded hyperscale facility in Australia – the kind Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building to serve new AI tools – somewhere between $70 and $80 leaves the country almost immediately. It flows to semiconductor makers in Taiwan, server manufacturers in the United States and cooling equipment giants in Europe.

You wouldn’t know this from the way the industry talks about itself. The headline numbers sound intoxicating: $26 billion in baseline investment by 2030, potentially $52 billion more, according to a Deloitte report – commissioned and paid for by Google – that envisions turning Australia into Asia Pacific’s AI hub.

The stakes are unusually high. Data centre investment decisions being made in the next two to three years will determine where this infrastructure sits for a generation, and to what degree Australia actually benefits. The promise is that Australian businesses will gain cheaper access to AI computing power, attract global tech talent, turbocharge productivity in industries from mining to healthcare, and catalyse billions in new renewable energy investment.

Atlassian’s billionaire co-founder, Scott Farquhar, reckons we should be “exporting megawatts as megabytes and getting paid megabucks”. Canva co-founder Cameron Adams says that data centres are the “biggest opportunity that I can see to add on an entirely new layer to Australia’s economy and kind of start diversifying us away from resources”. Steven Worrall, a former Microsoft executive now leading Telstra’s AI push, routinely calls it “one of the great economic opportunities for Australia”.

The Albanese government, too, has been ebullient. “Really, this technological revolution driven by AI is a huge focus of the cabinet,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said last month, crediting data centres with single-handedly driving a rebound in national business investment. “There’s a lot of investment flowing.”

They might be right. But the Australian Bureau of Statistics is telling a different story, noting this year that the surge in data centre investment was “supported by a corresponding rise in imports, leading to a reduced impact on GDP”.

Translation: the money is passing through Australia like water........

© Brisbane Times