# How wheelie bins, parked cars and people power beat an AI giant

An episode of [7am](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1461999702), 28 Oct 2026, 15 min.

Audio: https://p.podderapp.com/2544644999/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/2fb3740d-3436-44af-8cc0-a91900716aa5/62723a1f-3e96-4fc4-882c-b25e0181da4d/b093cbf6-d2ce-44f0-bb02-b4f10050a33c/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=70f29d90-2a63-48aa-bf8f-b25e0181da70

As data centres appear in suburbs across Australia, tech companies and governments have been touting the economic benefits of the boom. But for those who live near new and planned centres, the sell hasn’t worked. And now, the community backlash is starting to have big results. Today, ABC business reporter Daniel Ziffer on the fragility of the AI data centre boom. If you enjoy 7am, the best way you can support us is by making a contribution at 7ampodcast.com.au/support. Socials: Stay in touch with us on Instagram Guest: ABC business reporter Daniel Ziffer Photo: AAP Image/Christopher Hopkins See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to 7am. As data
[0:10] Speaker 1: centres appear in suburbs across Australia, tech companies and governments
[0:14] Speaker 1: have been touting the economic benefits of the boom. But
[0:18] Speaker 1: for those who live near new and planned centres, the
[0:21] Speaker 1: sell hasn't worked. And now the people-led pushback is starting
[0:25] Speaker 1: to have big results. Today, ABC business reporter Daniel Ziffer
[0:31] Speaker 1: on the fragility of the AI data centre boom. It's Thursday,
[0:41] Speaker 1: October 29. We don't want an expansion, but we don't
[0:49] Speaker 1: want any more data.
[0:51] Speaker 2: Centres at all.
[0:52] Speaker 1: Woo! Dan, I wanted to start in Melbourne, in Yarraville,
[0:58] Speaker 1: in the inner west. There's this small group of locals
[1:01] Speaker 1: on a suburban street who used their cars and their
[1:04] Speaker 1: bins to eventually derail a multi-billion dollar company. Talk me
[1:09] Speaker 1: through what happened.
[1:10] Speaker 2: Well, this is the small act of civil disobedience with
[1:13] Speaker 2: parked cars and rubbish bins that absolutely smashed one of
[1:17] Speaker 2: our largest companies, saw it dumped from the top 100
[1:21] Speaker 2: list in Australia. And a week ago, NextDC was a
[1:25] Speaker 2: $ 7 billion company. It's now closer to a $ 4 billion company. Now,
[1:30] Speaker 2: it's not entirely tied to this dispute, but it very
[1:33] Speaker 2: much is intrinsically linked to it. So essentially, we're talking
[1:36] Speaker 2: about the inner west of Melbourne, where residents in Sanderson
[1:40] Speaker 2: Street in Yarraville saw the march of industrial-scale power poles
[1:45] Speaker 2: towards their street. Now, instead of the kind of wooden
[1:48] Speaker 2: power poles you're probably used to seeing in suburbia, they're
[1:51] Speaker 2: about seven metres high. These poles are made of concrete
[1:54] Speaker 2: and they're closer to between 15 or 22 metres high.
[1:57] Speaker 2: The reason that they're bigger and stronger is they can
[2:00] Speaker 2: carry much higher voltage. They can get more juice to
[2:03] Speaker 2: where they're going. And it didn't take very long for
[2:05] Speaker 2: the residents to look behind them and see that it
[2:08] Speaker 2: was heading to the large M3 data centre run by
[2:12] Speaker 2: data centre veteran Next DC. So the holes were dug.
[2:17] Speaker 2: There was really no consultation as it doesn't really need
[2:19] Speaker 2: to be with electrical infrastructure, but the neighbours didn't stand
[2:22] Speaker 2: for that.
[2:23] Speaker 1: Well, the people of West Footscray, the people of the West,
[2:26] Speaker 1: we're coming together to say your profits don't matter, our
[2:30] Speaker 1: lives do.
[2:34] Speaker 2: On the day that the work was meant to happen,
[2:35] Speaker 2: they dragged their cars into the street and their bins.
[2:38] Speaker 2: the electrical distributor Gemini turned up, said, ah, no thanks,
[2:42] Speaker 2: and reversed at a massive rate, returning only to fill
[2:46] Speaker 2: in the holes. So that all happened. And that was,
[2:49] Speaker 2: you know, considered to be a bit of a hiccup
[2:51] Speaker 2: for Next DC. But what happened last week was they
[2:54] Speaker 2: announced to the stock exchange that because the power would
[2:57] Speaker 2: take longer to get to not just their existing data center,
[3:00] Speaker 2: but the big one now building on the back of it.
[3:03] Speaker 2: It was going to cause their future earnings to go
[3:05] Speaker 2: down by a third. They're going to deliver it more
[3:08] Speaker 2: than a year later. They were going to stop building
[3:12] Speaker 2: speculative sites. In fact, they were going to start thinking
[3:15] Speaker 2: of selling off development sites they already had. So this
[3:18] Speaker 2: crated the share price. Around $ 3 billion was wiped off
[3:22] Speaker 2: Next DC today, and it follows a downgrade triggered by
[3:26] Speaker 2: delays at one of its data centres in suburban Melbourne.
[3:32] Speaker 1: And this isn't the only AI data centre company to
[3:36] Speaker 1: have run into trouble in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Firmus,
[3:42] Speaker 1: which is another data centre company, was forced to abandon
[3:45] Speaker 1: its plan to list on the Australian Stock Exchange at
[3:48] Speaker 1: the very last minute. So tell me about what happened there.
[3:52] Speaker 2: Firmus is a really interesting company. And for a time,
[3:55] Speaker 2: it was set to be more valuable than Woolworths. So
[3:58] Speaker 2: this is a company that builds and operates data centres.
[4:02] Speaker 2: It says it has a proprietary technology that can do
[4:04] Speaker 2: it much more efficiently, uses vastly less water. which have
[4:07] Speaker 2: been one of the big concerns around the growth of
[4:10] Speaker 2: AI data centres. But it was still very small. It
[4:12] Speaker 2: only had a couple of sites. It was advanced data.
[4:15] Speaker 2: in Tasmania, in Singapore and Malaysia, all these different places
[4:18] Speaker 2: it was going to build. They were doing an initial
[4:22] Speaker 2: public offering, an IPO. That's when you float, you essentially
[4:25] Speaker 2: list on the stock market and you become then able
[4:28] Speaker 2: that the public can buy and sell literally a share
[4:31] Speaker 2: of you. They can trade in the company. They went
[4:34] Speaker 2: to the big investors first and said, we think this
[4:37] Speaker 2: is worth $ 11 a share. We think this company is
[4:39] Speaker 2: worth $ 44 billion, which would place it easily within our
[4:43] Speaker 2: top 20 largest companies in Australia. And at the last minute,
[4:47] Speaker 2: those big investors said, we don't share your optimism.
[4:50] Speaker 3: It was touted as the biggest ASX float in decades,
[4:54] Speaker 3: but all the fanfare that surrounded data centre startup Firmus
[4:58] Speaker 3: and its multi-billion dollar share market listing amounted to zip.
[5:03] Speaker 3: It had hoped to raise $ 44 billion, but tonight, any
[5:07] Speaker 3: plans for a share market debut are shelved.
[5:10] Speaker 2: So it never made. its way to the stock exchange.
[5:13] Speaker 2: It's now kind of licking its wounds, looking for private money,
[5:17] Speaker 2: talking about listing in America, although that seems unlikely given
[5:21] Speaker 2: this was one of the five biggest floats of the
[5:23] Speaker 2: year in the world. Today, relief among Tasmanian locals who've
[5:30] Speaker 2: staunchly opposed the firm's plans for three facilities over concerns
[5:34] Speaker 2: about power and water use. Even little people need to
[5:38] Speaker 2: stand up and fight for what's right.
[5:40] Speaker 1: And I mean, what role did community opposition play here?
[5:44] Speaker 2: A big one. The thought was that Australia was far
[5:48] Speaker 2: behind the kind of unrest that we're seeing in Europe
[5:51] Speaker 2: and the US around data centres. Now, you'd know that
[5:54] Speaker 2: we have soon the midterm elections in America and data
[5:57] Speaker 2: centres are very much on the ticket as an issue.
[6:04] Speaker 2: Already New York State and one other state have a moratorium,
[6:08] Speaker 2: a temporary ban on new data centers.
[6:11] Speaker 4: Signing an executive order Tuesday, Governor Hochul makes it official.
[6:15] Speaker 4: No new permits can be issued for artificial intelligence data
[6:19] Speaker 4: centers in New York over the next year.
[6:22] Speaker 3: Progress shouldn't arrive with a higher utility bill. deleted water
[6:26] Speaker 3: supply or noise pollution.
[6:28] Speaker 2: A lot of places that had previously welcomed the investment,
[6:32] Speaker 2: because most of the money in data centers is in
[6:34] Speaker 2: the construction. There's very few jobs once they're actually built.
[6:36] Speaker 2: They'd welcomed that investment, but they're becoming very concerned about
[6:39] Speaker 2: the same thing the community were concerned about. The immense
[6:42] Speaker 2: strain on water resources, increasing power bills because you had
[6:46] Speaker 2: one big customer, expanding the need for electricity, and people
[6:50] Speaker 2: being very concerned about just how keen government was to
[6:54] Speaker 2: boost an industry that, to many people, seems like a
[6:58] Speaker 2: large job-killing box that is also sucking water and making
[7:02] Speaker 2: the electricity prices more expensive. So all of these factors
[7:05] Speaker 2: meant that the political calibration changed, the temperature changed, people's
[7:11] Speaker 2: thoughts about this changed, and leaders were very attuned to it. Now,
[7:14] Speaker 2: Australia has been a bit not as far down that
[7:16] Speaker 2: line because we haven't had as many developments in as
[7:19] Speaker 2: sensitive locations. But recently, one in Lane Cove in Sydney
[7:23] Speaker 2: was pulled. There have been other data centre proposals that
[7:27] Speaker 2: have been quite far advanced that have fallen over because
[7:30] Speaker 2: essentially voters have started to raise their hackles and the
[7:33] Speaker 2: local council and the state governments, of which some, such
[7:37] Speaker 2: as Victoria, are very close to an election period, have
[7:40] Speaker 2: basically said, why are we getting behind this? Let's put
[7:43] Speaker 2: this on the back burner.
[7:48] Speaker 1: Still to come, is the data centre boom over before
[7:51] Speaker 1: it begins? Dan, we're seeing increased community opposition to data centres.
[8:02] Speaker 1: There's real-world consequences of that for governments and for the
[8:06] Speaker 1: companies themselves. What do you think this means moving forward?
[8:09] Speaker 1: Are data centres still going to be built in Australia?
[8:12] Speaker 2: Data centres are still going to be built. Some of
[8:14] Speaker 2: them are being built. They are very capital intensive. They
[8:18] Speaker 2: cost a lot of money. They are very worker intensive.
[8:21] Speaker 2: They're really difficult construction. They're vastly, from the outside, they
[8:24] Speaker 2: look like a big box, but inside they're extremely complicated structures.
[8:28] Speaker 2: electrical fire suppression systems. They're much more difficult and specialised
[8:34] Speaker 2: as something to build. But one of the weird things
[8:37] Speaker 2: about them, if you go to them, is that they are,
[8:39] Speaker 2: once completed, almost devoid of workers. It's scarily quiet around
[8:44] Speaker 2: these large boxes. They just don't need many people. Although
[8:47] Speaker 2: the industry will argue that what they unlock in the
[8:51] Speaker 2: ability of large computing power does impact jobs in a positive.
[8:55] Speaker 2: It enables more technologically and complex jobs to occur closer
[9:00] Speaker 2: to places that they already are occurring. There's your AI
[9:04] Speaker 2: training centers. They can be anywhere. They're very large. The
[9:08] Speaker 2: ones that are in your industrial areas, often abutting residential
[9:11] Speaker 2: areas or in the commercial spaces in the city, they
[9:14] Speaker 2: need to have latency. They need to have a really
[9:17] Speaker 2: good connection to where the customers are. That's why they've
[9:20] Speaker 2: been increasingly controversial because these are very large boxes with
[9:25] Speaker 2: amenity issues. They are sometimes noisy. They have diesel generators,
[9:29] Speaker 2: often a large swimming pool full of diesel just in
[9:32] Speaker 2: case the juice goes off. All of these things that
[9:35] Speaker 2: residents and people living near them don't like, they're the
[9:38] Speaker 2: ones that are the flashpoint at the moment. Although that said,
[9:41] Speaker 2: even the AI training ones, which can be more remote locations,
[9:44] Speaker 2: still have a lot of pushback from regional communities and
[9:47] Speaker 2: farming communities who don't like that use of land, who
[9:50] Speaker 2: don't like the water use, the power use. or the
[9:54] Speaker 2: destruction of jobs.
[9:55] Speaker 1: You mentioned that case in Lane Cove where residents were
[9:59] Speaker 1: able to successfully fight off a proposal for a data centre.
[10:03] Speaker 1: There was another development in Guildford West, which is a
[10:06] Speaker 1: less affluent area in Sydney that was approved despite growing opposition.
[10:10] Speaker 1: So does that raise questions to you about which communities
[10:13] Speaker 1: have the power to be able to actually fight back successfully?
[10:17] Speaker 2: I think with all development, the more organized you are,
[10:20] Speaker 2: the more retired property law QCs you have living in
[10:24] Speaker 2: your neighborhood, you know, your chances are better. coming into
[10:28] Speaker 2: an election. Well, you've timed yourself very well. A lot
[10:31] Speaker 2: of these developments have grown over time. We've had data
[10:33] Speaker 2: centers for decades. It's only that the scale of them
[10:36] Speaker 2: has increased as they've gone from storing data to that
[10:40] Speaker 2: data being mined and now that data being essentially expanded
[10:44] Speaker 2: upon with AI. So they've grown in size, they've grown
[10:47] Speaker 2: in number, they've grown in scale. We have a lot
[10:51] Speaker 2: of data centers in Australia. We could have a lot more.
[10:53] Speaker 2: We do have an immense amount of land, a huge
[10:55] Speaker 2: amount of sunshine, not very much water. There are things
[10:59] Speaker 2: that if the technology changes, if it's managed right, it
[11:02] Speaker 2: could be something that's really good for Australia. But you
[11:05] Speaker 2: can see from places like Ireland, where data centres consume
[11:09] Speaker 2: more electricity than the residential population of Ireland, that there
[11:14] Speaker 2: are real problems with a hyperscale build-out, a competition amongst
[11:19] Speaker 2: the globe's most valuable companies to build as fast as
[11:23] Speaker 2: possible and certainly faster than their competitor, all of that
[11:27] Speaker 2: is colliding with the political reality that communities are not
[11:32] Speaker 2: that keen anymore to host data centers. They're not seeing
[11:36] Speaker 2: the benefits. And we've seen this in regional areas in
[11:39] Speaker 2: recent years with transmission lines. If you don't see the
[11:42] Speaker 2: benefits and you're seeing all the downside, well, why wouldn't
[11:45] Speaker 2: you fight?
[11:45] Speaker 1: And we've been told by our government, by these tech companies,
[11:49] Speaker 1: that speed is crucial to this industry, that if we
[11:51] Speaker 1: don't get on board now, we risk missing out entirely.
[11:55] Speaker 1: But it's also that speed that is undermining trust and
[11:59] Speaker 1: goodwill in the industry. So how fragile is all of
[12:02] Speaker 1: this at the moment?
[12:03] Speaker 2: Well, you know, that sounds like more of a Shelbyville
[12:06] Speaker 2: idea than a Springfield one. You know, like the monorail,
[12:09] Speaker 2: you know, you don't want to miss out on this one. Look,
[12:12] Speaker 2: there are immense benefits to AI. It's going to be
[12:15] Speaker 2: up to communities and governments to work out what they're
[12:17] Speaker 2: comfortable with with the speed of that build-out. There is
[12:21] Speaker 2: immense potential. As I said, Australia has a lot of space.
[12:24] Speaker 2: It has a highly educated, affluent population. This could be
[12:28] Speaker 2: something that is really good. What I think they've worked
[12:32] Speaker 2: out very belatedly is how important social license is, which
[12:35] Speaker 2: is the approval of the people to things that happen.
[12:40] Speaker 2: And this stuff changes. A hundred years ago, we were
[12:43] Speaker 2: completely down with whaling. We did tons of whaling. We
[12:46] Speaker 2: killed so many whales. Now, only a few countries in
[12:50] Speaker 2: the world kill whales, and we think they're pretty weird
[12:53] Speaker 2: for doing so. Social license seems really woolly, but it
[12:57] Speaker 2: is important. It's the reason why we don't have lead
[13:02] Speaker 2: paint anymore. It's the reason why things change and improve
[13:05] Speaker 2: in society is that social license shapes what is acceptable.
[13:10] Speaker 2: At the moment, data centers are a flashpoint. They are
[13:13] Speaker 2: a physical manifestation of people's fears about AI. A lot
[13:17] Speaker 2: of people will be listening to this conversation via a
[13:20] Speaker 2: data center, right? They are a cog in our life.
[13:23] Speaker 2: They're something we use. But there is this real concern
[13:26] Speaker 2: about them, about the growth about what they're being used for,
[13:29] Speaker 2: what they consume, and how little say people have had
[13:33] Speaker 2: when they are in or abutting residential neighbourhoods.
[13:40] Speaker 1: Well, Daniel, thank you so much for speaking with me.
[13:43] Speaker 2: Always a joy.
[13:55] Speaker 1: Also in the news... Australia's inflation rate rose more than
[13:58] Speaker 1: expected in September, raising expectations of an interest rate hike
[14:02] Speaker 1: next week. The Consumer Price Index rose to 0.8% in
[14:07] Speaker 1: the month from 0.4% in August, taking annual inflation to 4.3%,
[14:13] Speaker 1: up from 4% a month earlier. The ABS said housing
[14:16] Speaker 1: was the largest contributor to annual inflation in September, rising
[14:20] Speaker 1: by 5.2%. And early exit polls in Israel show the
[14:26] Speaker 1: election could be deadlocked and it may be weeks before
[14:29] Speaker 1: a clear winner emerges. In his address to supporters yesterday,
[14:33] Speaker 1: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was waiting for real results.
[14:38] Speaker 1: It remains unclear whether Netanyahu will be able to form
[14:41] Speaker 1: a coalition government. I'm Ruby Jones.
[14:44] Speaker 2: This is 7am.
[14:45] Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.
[14:45] Speaker 3: Music you

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