Data centres are already operating across Australia, and the numbers behind the boom are ugly: 251 of the warehouse-like facilities are up and running, with more in the pipeline, while the water, electricity and land they demand keep climbing. The pitch from advocates is simple enough. Jobs. But the machinery behind Google search AI results, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot is chewing through public resources at a scale that lands hardest on everyone else.
Who Pays for the Server Farms
A 1 megawatt data centre consumes 25.5 million litres of water a year for cooling, more than 10 Olympic swimming pools' worth. Sydney Water projected data centres could use around a quarter of the city's yearly drinking water by the end of the 2020s, roughly 87.5 billion litres. The Climate Council says data centres used 2 per cent of Australia's total electricity last year, with that figure set to jump to 6 per cent by the end of the decade. That’s the real bill. Not the glossy promises. Not the corporate talk about innovation. The infrastructure sits on land, water and power that ordinary people need, and the appetite keeps growing.
Australia is one of the world's biggest investors in data centres, according to the Global Data Centres Report 2025 released by Knight Frank. The report came out 1 year ago. The scale of the investment tells its own story. These facilities are not little tech sheds. They are huge warehouse-like structures built to process, store and manage digital data, and they exist to keep the AI economy humming while the rest of society is told to accept the strain.
Jobs at the Front End, Automation at the Back End
In the short term, data centres can create thousands of jobs. A Brookings Institution report found large workforces were needed to build data centres, with one study estimating construction could support between 1,000 and 10,000 workers depending on the size of the centre. Construction can take about 12 to 18 months for an individual building, and at the height of construction approximately 1,500 workers are on site from various construction-related industries, according to a report prepared for the Virginia state government in the US.
Then the work dries up. A UK government report found "data centres are highly automated facilities, and the number of jobs directly created is relatively modest, ranging from a few tens to a few hundreds." Jobs figures cited in the report from two UK data centre operators estimated only 20-88 full-time employees were needed on site. A similar report for the Virginia state government found a 23,226sqm data centre, roughly the size of three NRL fields, "may have approximately 50 full-time workers, about half of which are contract workers." The Brookings Institution said data centre advocates "overstate" potential employment benefits. That’s the neat trick: big promises up front, a tiny permanent workforce after the concrete dries.
At the same time, University of Melbourne senior lecturer in construction technology M. Reza Hosseini warned a data centre construction boom could create a shortage of workers needed to build houses. He said, "Data centre construction demands highly specialised trades like high-voltage electricians, industrial cooling technicians and advanced mechanical engineers — jobs that only partly overlap with residential building." He added, "But in a market already stretched thin, even partial overlap matters." Hosseini also said, "When a hyper-scale project offers premium wages to secure electricians for 18 months, those workers are unavailable for housing." The hierarchy is plain enough: one sector gets the labour, another gets squeezed, and the people trying to build homes are left competing with hyper-scale projects backed by deeper pockets.
What the Industry Calls Growth
At the time of writing, there were more than 1,100 job listings for data centre technicians across Australia on SEEK.com. One listing for a technician in Melbourne offered a $149,000 salary, plus an annual bonus of $14,900. Another listing for an HVAC service technician offered up to $55 per hour for the installation and servicing of cooling towers at data centres in Sydney and across NSW. A senior facilities technician listing for Melbourne offered $145,000 to help operate "a hyper-scale data centre facility due to go live later this year." The listing for a day shift electrical technician in Sydney had compensation at $137,000.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has outlined new expectations for the AI industry, including that data centres minimise energy demand and emissions and "secure new and additional clean energy generation or storage to offset demand." He also expects operators to provide transparent reporting on water usage and efficiency and to build drought and climate change resilience into operations. Those expectations sound tidy on paper. But the article’s own figures show the scale of the load already being pushed onto water systems, power grids and labour markets. The state can issue expectations. The facilities still consume.
The debate around data centres keeps circling the same promise: jobs now, automation later, and a lot of public strain in between. The numbers don’t flatter the pitch. They show a system that concentrates benefits at the top while spreading the costs across water supplies, electricity networks and workers who get pulled into the churn.