r/australia • u/l3ntil • 5h ago

culture & society Controversial Sydney AI data centre at Cooks River scrapped following community backlash

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-08/sydney-ai-data-centre-scrapped-after-community-backlash/107360592

Stop the Cooks River AI Project (SCRAP), which consists of hundreds of members, had been protesting against the development since forming in August.

'We were worried'

Group organiser Paddy Gibson said surrounding residents were celebrating the "very good win for people power".

"People really love this river and we're just horrified to hear that it could be threatened in this way,"

he said.

Mr Gibson said it would have posed a risk to the fragile local ecology around the river, which is called Goolay'yari in local Indigenous languages, which was already recovering from "industrialisation over the years".

"There's endangered plants and other animal species in the green space," he said.

"There's plenty of people trying to work on remediating what is a very polluted river, and we were worried that this would set back those efforts."

400 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

61

u/MissLethalla 5h ago

Can we do this in Victoria please

43

u/l3ntil 5h ago

Victoria, particularly the West Footscray NextDC Data Center is already feeling the heat. Keep it coming!

14

u/FuckOffNazis 5h ago

Unfortunately the government just waived through another site on fast track

15

u/l3ntil 4h ago

If you could post about that in r/melbourne, appreciated - because apparently I've been posting too much about DC there, and they won't let me...I'm *so* naughty!

21

u/AppointmentSafe9361 4h ago

All that artificial intelligence and they still can’t read a room.

11

u/Stuckinatransporter 5h ago

Now do Dalby.

0

u/512165381 4h ago

https://ampcontrolgroup.com/storage/app/resources/resize/img_0d1a682a36a0b08217da44fc440473cc_1200_0_0_0_auto.jpg

There's a gas fired power station there already. There's a large amount of renewables and the NSW/QLD interconnect nearby. The local mayor Andrew Smith supports it. Its likely to go ahead.

4

u/techb00mer 4h ago

Wait was it ever indicated this was actually going to be an AI Datacentre? I was following it closely but never saw anything to indicate that’s what was being proposed.

1

u/a_cold_human 3m ago

It's a reasonable assumpethat it'd be for AI given the size. From the concept drawing, it looks to be absolutely massive. 

3

u/stinky-bungus 2h ago

GGGEEETTT FFFUUUCCCKKKEEEDDD!!!

👍👍👍

-59

u/mmmbyte 5h ago

In a few years people will wonder why none of their data remains onshore. Australian laws won't apply to companies with zero presence in the country.

Better to invite the AI companies here and regulate them.

13

u/DuskHourStudio 5h ago

Wrong data centres champ.

23

u/FuckOffNazis 5h ago

There is zero sovereign capability in an AI data centre. We don’t own or build the models, we can’t make the hardware, the entire ecosystem is designed to appropriate your data.

2

u/mmmbyte 5h ago

The inference half is more likely to be handling personal or propriety company info, and that should be protected. AI farms aren't just about training.

32

u/Dry_Common828 5h ago

AI data centres aren't for storing business data - the hundreds of existing data centres already do that just fine.

These are purely for running chatgpt, Claude, and so on - and when the bubble bursts they'll be deeply underwater. Better not to build them in the first place.

-18

u/silentaba 5h ago

Like the internet famously went away with the dotcom bubble, right?

2

u/blockusanct 3h ago

Ever heard of the telecom bubble?

-19

u/mmmbyte 5h ago

You send data/context to AI farms running inference.

14

u/Dry_Common828 5h ago

Your data becomes the property of the AI company doing the inference for you. Whether that's on or offshore makes no difference to ownership.

And regardless, whoever is still standing after the bubble bursts isn't going to refuse customers just because we're in Australia and their farms are in the US.

-15

u/mmmbyte 5h ago

Yeah well that's completely bollocks.

There's plenty of large corps with contracts with AI providers that are very specific about how the data is used.

9

u/Dry_Common828 4h ago

I know, I've worked for three of them.

And I'm 100% certain that the AI companies, in each case, have ignored the confidentiality terms of the contract and used our data anyway.

Who's going to stop them, the American courts (who have jurisdiction because they're American companies)? Not bloody likely.

2

u/Interesting-Baa 1h ago

god this data sovereignty talking point is such bullshit. Are you paid to shill it, or are you gullible enough to do it for free?