Tuesday, 17 February 2026

 Tim READ (Brunswick) (19:15): (1525) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Energy and Resources and Minister for Climate Action. The action I seek is that the government ensure that the data centre boom in Victoria does not delay the transition from coal to renewable energy or inflate Victorians’ power bills. AirTrunk, a self-described hyperscale data centre operator, has set up shop in Victoria. AirTrunk builds giant data centres with an unquenchable thirst for water and power. It is owned by Blackstone, a $1.2 trillion investment company, with a record of deforestation in the Amazon. AirTrunk’s founder told Forbes magazine last year:

The way I see AI, this is the biggest single biggest gold rush in human history. It’s going to generate so much wealth for everyone.

But Victoria knows a thing or two about gold fever. The Victorian gold rush was a time of extraordinary wealth and rapid growth but also human folly and wild speculation. The Victorian government has gold fever anew and has declared its ambition to make our state the data centre capital of the country, luring big tech with a light-touch approach to regulation.

Data centres require enormous uninterrupted supplies of electricity and water, and data centre connection requests are surging in Victoria, driven in part by speculation. Even so, according to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, data centres could account for up to 11 per cent of Australia’s total electricity consumption by 2035. Before we sell off the farm and sprint to the goldfields with pick in hand we need to ask: what is the cost? The Greens fear it will be Victorians and our climate that pay the price. A single 1-gigawatt data centre, like the one proposed for western Sydney, would use almost half the output of Victoria’s Loy Yang A power station if running at full capacity, pumping out 6 ‍million tonnes of carbon emissions each year. If you powered that data centre with solar, you would need a solar plant bigger than anything that currently exists in Australia. Rapid growth in data centres risks slowing Victoria’s transition to clean energy by locking in higher overall electricity demand at a time when we need to shut down our dirty, ageing and unreliable coal-fired generators. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation warns that without additional renewable energy and storage to accommodate the AI data centre boom, wholesale electricity prices could rise by 23 per cent in Victoria by 2035. The government must act to prevent Victorian households and our climate from the avoidable financial and environmental damage wrought by AI data centre gold fever.