Dr Bronwyn Cumbo

Data centres are usually referred to as the engines of the internet.

So they're the things that store all of our digital data and process all of our digital data.

So when you do a Google query, it travels down a fibre optic cable, it lands in a data centre where it sits in a server rack, this data, and it gets processed and then travels back to

to your device.

So our contemporary digital society is very material and all that data processing is very material.

So it's actually travelling through space down fibre and then landing in this building that we have.

We have quite a few of them around Sydney.

Yeah.

So data centers are becoming a headline at the moment, mainly because of the rise of AI and particularly generative AI.

So the amount of compute, and that's really about the processing.

So what's required to do all that digital labor that

processing work.

AI is much more complex and generative AI is even more complex.

So that requires, at the moment, larger facilities and servers and GPUs, graphic processing units, that are networked to enable high efficiencies and high levels of processing.

So the industry itself is looking at ways we can enable various forms of AI to enter

in different ways, and one big component of that is building the infrastructure that supports it.

So that is the data centres themselves as well as the cables, and that includes the submarine cables that connects our internet and creates this global network.

Yeah, so in Australia we've got about 270 data centres.

Ownership is...

It's hard for me to answer that question.