Another great opinion piece, imv, about the US elections/ Australian data centre issue +.

Where data centres were on the ballots, Americans voted no – so comprehensively that just one of the 41 ballots passed...

We know Australians don’t like data centres, but so far it’s not as all-encompassing a public issue.

But Australian governments have a history of being suckers to industry. We did it with fossil fuels and we have started doing it with AI companies. Now that the US has hit a stumbling block on approvals, Big Tech will start looking for the next good-enough sucker to keep their growth plans on track...

Australia is primed to be that sucker. Not because the public wants it. Not because there are any demonstrable benefits to people. Certainly not because we have the resources to spare. And not because we’ll even own it. But because our governments love to be wrong in the “right” company...

The playbook is almost exactly the same as fossil fuels – despite not contributing much, if anything, to the economic prosperity of Australian citizens (in fact, the opposite), the AI industry is presenting itself to Australia as the backbone of a future economy – it just needs subsidies, Australian resources and tax write-offs to one day have it recognised.

We’re not all in yet, but we don’t have a great history of standing up to these robber barons.

In America, you could see the shift happening as tech overlords worked out they need to care about some sort of social licence, with the focus increasingly on linking renewable energy with AI.

But renewables are good for the environment only if they replace fossil fuels. That part of the equation is never made as public as it should be in these conversations. It’s not hard to see where that shift ends up – renewable energy companies suddenly seeing potential in what were unviable projects if they promise to power data centres – with both taking the “reasonable” position that fossil fuels like gas will have to underwrite the project in the short term.

In the US, the blue-nami hit so hard that creatures like OpenAI boss Sam Altman immediately began talking about how “people should always be in control of the future” and “people should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress”.

Or – and stay with me here – governments working for people should constrain Big Tech, which is actively working against people. And the planet. Because that’s what people and the planet need.

Australia has a habit of having these conversations vertically, or top down, when they affect people horizontally – as in all of us, across the board.