Data centres create a people power surge the industry didn’t see coming

October 27, 2026 — 5:37pm

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The growth in data centres has become a case study in power: corporate, government and the will of people. The rise of artificial intelligence and the data centres that deliver it have been spectacular, both in financial terms and in its potential to fundamentally change life on this planet.

In this new world order, a centuries-old law of science should also be invoked – Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This has been clearly demonstrated recently – two companies NextDC and Firmus have been battered in two very different ways.

Firmus’s investors throttled back their enthusiasm for the company’s aspirations, prompting the withdrawal of its plans for a multibillion-dollar listing on the ASX. It was a local symptom of a very global scepticism around the boomtime spruiking of AI companies.

NextDC was upended not by traders, not initially anyway, but by people whose lives would be directly affected, and were being affected, by data centre development.

For NextDC, suburban resistance........

© The Age