By Peter Gartside
When, back in June 2025, The Westsider published an article pointing out the rapid growth of data centres in the West, we were definitely onto something. Since then, campaigners have unearthed more applications and approvals, and construction has begun on several more hyperscale facilities in the West, including the CDC Laverton AI data centre that sparked the initial article.
Despite the lack of publicly available documentation, in the last few months the issue of data centres, their power and water use, noise pollution and environmental impacts, and the undemocratic way they have been foisted on unwitting communities, has gone mainstream. Now the issue threatens to have a significant impact on marginal seats in the forthcoming state election.
So on a damp August Sunday, around 250 people rallied at Hansen Reserve in West Footscray to express their serious concerns about the rollout of these massive projects and to call for a moratorium on any further data centre approvals and a pause on construction.
The gathering was remarkable for the way it brought together people from across the political spectrum. Indeed it’s hard to think of another issue that has united such a cross section of the community. Speakers included the candidates for the Footscray electorate, and members of the Citizens of Tottenham group who found themselves living next door to the Next DC M3 facility when few of us knew what a data centre was. They’ve had over three years of disruption, noise and light pollution from constant construction and their stories reflected the impact on them as a community.
The rally then walked to the NextDC data centre in Tottenham, a visit to which is highly recommended for anyone concerned about this issue. Its size and proximity to people’s houses are really confronting, and the company has now applied for a second expansion, a decision on which currently sits with the Minister for Planning.
The non-partisan coalition that came together to coordinate the rally included people from as far west as Melton and Diggers Rest and from other parts of the metropolitan area. As well as playing a part in organising the rally, Borderlands Cooperative has helped research and collate information to track all Victorian data centres, from initial application to completed construction, into a wiki site.
Borderlands’s Coordinator Jorge Jorquera says this will be a powerful tool for campaigners, since one of the problems has been the lack of publicly accessible information on data centre projects. “The wiki will include alerts when a new application is lodged with the Department of Transport and Planning, or an infrastructure upgrade seems to indicate a likely data centre project in the offing,” he says.
Perhaps the single issue that unites all the campaigners for a moratorium is the feeling that the public is being kept in the dark and not consulted. Under the state government’s Development Facilitation Program (DFP), planning applications bypass local councils and so any opportunity for democratic oversight.
David Ettershanks MP told the rally that the DFP acts as a ‘black box’. He called for the public release of the Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan, which the government continues to refer campaigners to, but, remarkably, has so far refused to produce, even to parliament.
As The Westsider flagged over a year ago, once construction is complete, data centres provide almost no jobs: the tech is imported and coupled to the grid, maintenance is remote, and the processors are junked, not fixed, once they start to fail. They use a massive amount of power and will have priority access to the grid. There’s every possibility that data centre power use will be responsible for rising domestic energy bills.
We’ll continue to monitor data centre developments here in the West. And, thanks to the hard work of local campaigners, readers can now do the same at datacentremoratorium.net.
