Dr Bronwyn Cumbo

A lot of the data centre developers that you see in the news are called co-locators.

So companies who are data centre developers are essentially real estate developers, depending on their business model.

So you've got companies like AirTrunk, Equinix, NextDC.

These type of developers build co-locators, which is a model where they essentially build the shell of a data centre and the infrastructure, so the cooling system

and the electricity, so the electricity and water networks.

And then you have the data center halls.

And then they have clients that come in and rent out these halls.

And mostly their clients are what they call hyperscalers.

So we're talking big tech, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or AWS.

And so that's the kind of business arrangement.

You also have hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon building their own infrastructure.

And we're seeing more of that in Australia.

Like we recently saw the $25 billion commitment from Microsoft and there was one earlier this year from AWS.

I think it's important to point out firstly that no data centre is the same and we've had data centres in Australia for decades.

They just haven't been an issue until recently because of the size and scale of the new data centres coming in and also the pace that the industry is expanding, particularly in our urban industrial areas.

So in terms of the headlines, they're really referring to these more modern data centres, the hyperscale data centres, which are usually over 100 megawatts.

They can be a little bit less.

They're all quite large.

They're state-significant developments, so they're managed by the state government, mainly because of their huge energy consumption.

So the capacity of a data centre is measured in energy in megawatts or gigawatts.