By David Swan
Publication Date: 2026-04-06 04:18:00
There’s a number the data center industry doesn’t like to talk about. For every $100 put into a fully utilized hyperscale facility in Australia – the kind Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building to support new AI tools – around $70 to $80 leaves the country almost immediately. It flows to semiconductor makers in Taiwan, server makers in the United States and cooling equipment giants in Europe.
You can’t tell by the way the industry talks about itself. The headlines sound heady: $26 billion in baseline investment by 2030, potentially $52 billion more, according to a Deloitte report commissioned and paid for by Google that envisions making Australia the AI hub of the Asia-Pacific.
