Australia is in the midst of a data centre boom. The build-out of data centres globally is impacting the world’s collective efforts to tackle the climate crisis, and threatens to derail the clean energy transition. This report documents the scale of the problem in Australia, where so far the government has welcomed data centre investment.

This report reveals how the rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) data centres in Australia is set to derail the renewable energy transition, entrench gas and accelerate climate pollution, prompting calls for an urgent moratorium on data centre approvals until appropriate guardrails are in place.

Key findings

• Australia’s biggest proposed data centre, the 1GW Mamre Road Data Centre Campus in Western Sydney, will generate peak annual grid emissions equivalent to that produced by 560,000 petrol cars for a year or all domestic flights within NSW in 2023.
• Data centres already fail to cover their own emissions with new renewables and their rollout will dramatically hold back Australia’s energy transition.
• No data centre operator analysed in this report adequately proves their claim of driving Australia’s renewable energy growth. 
• There are early signs of a data centre-fuelled gas boom in Australia, which will come with nationally significant climate costs.