데이터센터 건설 붐 규모가 180억 달러에 달했다고 Real Estate가 보도했다. 에너지 수요가 전력망을 위협하고 있다.
Australia is spending more money building data centres to power the AI revolution than it is on new offices and warehouses, where people work, new figures show.
An analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Building Activity data found that spending on electricity-hungry data centres has surpassed the amount invested in constructing offices and warehouses combined. About $18.2 billion of work was started between 2025 and 2026 in the category that includes new data centre developments, compared with $10 billion on new warehouses and $7.3 billion on new offices.
The surge in data centre construction has been flagged as inflationary. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) recently noted that it is one of the forces fuelling the sticky inflation that has led to interest rate hikes and, in turn, falling property prices.
The ABS data tracks 15 categories of non-residential property, measuring how much work has been started, finished or is yet to be done. The category that includes private investment in data centres ranked 14th in the 2019/20 financial year but rose to first place last year.
About $6.4 billion of construction work was completed in the data centres category over the most recent financial year, and projects worth just $2.4 billion were finished. At the end of June, $18.3 billion of work in the category was still to be built. The analysis also found that data centres were being built at a much slower rate than other non-residential developments.
While constructing a massive data centre involves thousands of tradespeople, an operational facility typically requires only 20 to 50 permanent staff on site.
Data centres that have already been built are drawing large amounts of power from the residential electrical grid, and they are expected to draw even more. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) expects electricity usage by data centres on the southeast grid to triple by 2030, and projects that data centres will account for 13 per cent of total usage by 2036.
The analysis, conducted by Primara Research for Green.com.au, found that data centres made up 66 per cent of total electricity demand in NSW and 33 per cent in Victoria.
Dave Green, founder of renewable energy company Green.com.au, said the government needs to plan ahead for the consequences of electricity-intensive industries such as data centres.
"Government, business and the public all have to think about what supplying an industry like this does to the grid," Mr Green said.
"Businesses and households that generate their own power are in a stronger position, but the cost of keeping the grid reliable for everyone else is increasingly a question for government and the wider economy," he said.