The digital future is about power, planning and policy. As AI models scale and data centre demand surges, their absence from our policy frameworks starts to look like a glaring miss. We urgently need a national framework that ensures growth in this industry is clean, resilient and inclusive.

The world’s cleanest electrons and brightest minds can converge here, but not by accident. We’ve got the land, the investment, and the will to do this - but policy must account for the resource-intensity of these projects.

Last week, we saw how efficiency matters in this equation; co-locating energy with data centres reduces grid pressures and decentralizes compute consumption. Renewable Energy Zones could be the ideal locations for regional development hubs that host new job-creating industries - like data centres.

However, despite the fact that 70% of farmers would consider hosting new energy infrastructure, the common media narrative is one of conflict and tension in the regions.

Last week, we explored Gridlock — the transmission bottleneck in our national electricity grid.

Transmission is expensive though, and takes a long time to build. What if we bought the power directly to the data centres themselves?

By 2030, Australia’s data centres could consume 15% of our national electricity per Morgan Stanley research, more than almost every other industry in Australia. But, there’s an obstacle that could stall this clean-powered boom before it begins - the grid.