Anthony Albanese left the door open at a meeting of the nation’s leaders on Wednesday to a more “flexible” approach as Queensland and the Northern Territory refused to agree to standards requiring them to use renewables for new data centre developments.
There are data centres in every city and there has been since the 90’s. You could even argue that telephone exchanges before this filled a similar niche for us.
A regular data centre hosts basically everything on the Internet. Web sites (including this one), databases, storage, email, as well as the network switches and routers that underpin the entire Internet. They are necessary infrastructure and aren’t controversial because they are more efficient and better for the environment than every company still having their old server room.
These LLM servers are all about processing. They are far louder - think of the fan noise when your computer gets busy. It’s like that. All the time multiplied by thousands of servers. They generate a lot more heat. They have much bigger power and cooling requirements.