The government wants AI data centres to minimise water use and maximise energy efficiency, but those rules will mean little without public, facility-level measurement of their real impact.

Two lines from the recent announcement by Australia’s Prime Minister on artificial intelligence (AI) should be read side by side.

First: “Last week, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations published real-time, data-driven analysis of AI’s impact on the labour market.”

Second: “Which is why our rules will require data centres to minimise their water use, maximise their energy efficiency, and pay for any additional water infrastructure required.”

Put together, they point to a gap the government may not have intended. On employment, it has established a monitoring framework – an independent, data-driven way to track the relationship between AI and jobs, and one that carefully notes its findings are not yet definitive. On water and energy, no comparable framework has been announced.

Requiring data centres to minimise their water use is welcome. But minimise against what baseline? And the rule skips the prior questions entirely: how much water will these data centres use, where will it come from and how much is sustainably available in the first place?

Efficiency alone is not enough. A highly efficient data centre can still consume a very large amount of water and electricity, and could still mean more water drawn from a catchment that may have none to spare.

Requiring operators to pay for any additional water infrastructure begs the questions against what baseline, boundary, time period — it presupposes a measurement and reporting system that has not yet been announced.

The promise that data centres will........

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