Australian politicians and business leaders are arguing that their populace’s growing resentment of AI datacentres is an inauthentic import from the United States. Like the US, Australia is seeing community resentment grow in response to a surge in the construction of massive AI datacentres. However, pro-datacentre officials and executives argue the scale of Australia’s buildout is smaller, more regulated and therefore less damaging than that in the US.
They say the burgeoning negative reaction is being tainted and inflamed by a heated US debate that has arrived down under via social media feeds. When the backlash began in earnest in the United States last year, it echoed slowly in Australia. In 2026, though, it has exploded into national conversation across the country, leading to calls for a national moratorium, community protests, three government inquiries, state frameworks being developed and the Australian government moving to set the rules for how the datacentres can be built, and how they consume energy and water.
Australian state governments, desperate for economic growth, have been broadly welcoming of the investment for the new centres, in some cases overriding local council approval processes, given the size of the projects being developed. In July, Victoria’s then-minister for economic growth, Steve Dimopoulos, boasted that his state was second only to New South Wales in terms of datacentres, and was outstripping Australia’s most populous state in growth for new centres. He expressed concern that the growing resentment toward new developments was a result of US social media influence.
And those campaigns and mega-developments in the US shape public opinion in Australia,” he said. Our planning, energy and water systems are much more carefully monitored, managed and regulated.” Leaders in the datacentre sector have also complained about the backlash, calling it misleading and disingenuous. Dennett said reactions to datacentres from everyday people range from curiosity to confusion and fear, and the news around the sector was “alarming”.
They are being transplanted wholesale into Australian debates as though the contexts were interchangeable.” Dennett said the US has 5,400 datacentres, with 53.7 gigawatts of total capacity, compared with 252 in Australia with 1.4 gigawatts of capacity. Measurements of the number of US datacentres vary. What Dennett omitted was that Australia, with a population of 28 million, has just under one datacentre per 100,000 people, compared with 1.5 per 100,000 people in the US, population 342.7 million.
The pace of datacentre construction is increasing rapidly in Australia, with several large datacentres with 1 gigawatts or more capacity in the planning. Trending videos on TikTok and Instagram highlight major local community concerns including a 2.4 gigawatt centre planned for outer Melbourne, and a 2 gigawatt gas-powered centre in the Northern Territory. That is the equivalent of 2m households’ annual electricity consumption, said Rob Nicholls, professor and senior research associate in digital policy at the University of Sydney.
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