Essay by Eric Worrall
… The tech industry has been pushing the government to … subsidise AI processing power through multi-billion dollar deals …
Tech giants pitch data centres as climate saviours – not threats
Ryan Cropp and Amelia McGuire
Sep 25, 2025 – 6.53pm…
The substantial future energy demands of Australia’s nascent data centre industry were cited by the Climate Change Authority last week as a key “delivery risk” informing the lower end of its recommendation that the government target a 62 to 70 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2035.
…
Push to subsidise AI processing power
The tech industry has been pushing the government to follow the lead of the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Norway and others and subsidise AI processing power through multi-billion dollar deals with players including Nvidia and generative AI juggernaut OpenAI.
Assistant Science Minister Andrew Charlton said on Wednesday the government was in the process of developing an AI and data centre strategy.
…
In February last year, US data centre giant Equinix signed an offtake agreement with the operator of the $3 billion Golden Plains Wind Farm in Victoria to ensure its power requirements were fully offset by renewable energy.
…
“When Google invests in data centres, it’s done in a way that creates additional new clean energy generation capacity on the grid, helping to support systems and enable investments needed to drive productivity and prosperity,” he said.
…“We need to retire coal and gas over time, but you can’t have demand going up while supply goes down,” …
Read more: https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/tech-giants-pitch-data-centres-as-climate-saviours-not-threats-20250925-p5mxt6
Everyone seems to be dancing carefully around explaining why Big Tech needs large subsidies to invest in Australia.
I love the phrase the google representative used, “offset by renewable energy”. If they were planning to power the new data centers with renewables, they could have said “powered entirely by renewable energy”.
Except if the Aussie government caves to industry demands, it might not even be the likes of Google who will be paying for the useless new renewable energy plants. Perhaps the deal on offer is that the Aussie government has to pay for everything.
If the Aussie government pays an AI subsidy to big tech, who uses some of that subsidy to build renewable energy plants, that is functionally equivalent to the government giving much of that subsidy money directly to green energy companies, with one important exception.
Instead of being a “green subsidy”, the money used to build those renewable plants can be described as an “AI subsidy”.
The government gets to shrink the embarrassment of having to openly give 10s of billions of dollars to the renewable industry, by claiming the corporate welfare is actually being used to build the future, to boost Australia’s AI capability.
I mean, surely that can’t be the plan, can it? They surely wouldn’t be so sneaky and underhanded?
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You’re forgetting the money-arrow that leads back to the government ministers that approve the solar plants…
Eventually, someone’s going to go nuclear, one way or another.
I’m waiting for the paragraph explaining how the AI computers will be powered when the wind isn’t blowing, and the sun isn’t shining.
Perhaps the real future has everyone staying at home living off of government welfare schemes while wind and sun powered AI computer systems are growing crops, building houses and educating our kids … although with no industry in the new AI/computer run society there won’t be much use for education.
I’m joking. I hope.
You can’t have demand going up while supply goes down,” …
Well, duh… yeah. Ed Miliband begs to differ.
This is left wing math, where the answer is whatever the government wants it to be.
“How many fingers am I holding up Winston.”
The Australians (population 27 million) seem under the same delusion as the Brits (population 69 million.) Both countries think they can save the world or at least themselves by eliminating CO2 emissions. The world (population 8.2 billion knows differently. Even if continued CO2 emissions can cause climate difficulties (the data says not) there is nothing whatsoever that reduced CO2 emissions from either or both can affect the outcome. Even the US is a bit player. China and India are in control.
There was a time we were a world leader, back in the 1950s Australia emerged virtually unscathed from WW2, we had the cheapest energy in the world and a booming manufacturing sector thanks to infrastructure built to support the war.
Then the militant left messed it all up, first by killing our competitive advantages, then in the 90s by embracing green energy.
Now instead of being the lucky country, we’re more the basket case economy country. The only advantage we have over Britain and Europe is you can survive the winter in the more tropical parts of Australia without home heating.
The thing that worries me most about the screaming hurry to start everyone using AI for every situation they’re seeking answers or info about is that the general populace is going to become even dumber than it is now.
(if that’s possible)
People won’t be thinking anything through, just running with whatever their AI app serves up.
Which in most cases will just be a scrape of Wikipedia or the like, but served up hot.
The Idiocracy is coming.
If the present course continues, the future could be a mish mash of two prophetic movies.
Idiocracy meets Planet of the Apes.
More like Terminator with no Arnie to save us this time.
I take offence to the sentence.
The government does not pay for anything. The tax payers do.
Fair point
I suggest that AI will become, if it hasn’t already, co-opted by the globalists/ideologists to further their reach into controlling our lives. Think about it. A computer program that tells us what do do/think programmed by man. They did it with AGW.
I see Nvidea is now the world’s largest company by market cap at $4.3tr. Clearly there is a lot of money to be made using AI.
Nvidea are selling AI boxes for training for around $3000. That is the price I paid for my first desktop PC back in the early 80s.
If you put $1000 into Nvidea in 2015, it would now be worth $350,000. Not often gains like that come by.
The key will be knowing when to sell before the AI bubble bursts.
Australia is becoming the rooftop solar supapower. That automatically excludes all energy intensive industries. AI data centres are not going to be powered from household batteries.
No matter how much wind and solar gets crammed into the grid, the need for dispatchable generating capacity is not reduced. All that happens is that it gets used less often so needs to charge a fortune for energy delivered to recover stand-by costs.
An important distinction with the evolving grid is that dispatchable generation is an essential service while wind, solar and batteries energy sources are NOT essential. They are a total waste of resources in the Australian grid.
Australia has many problems but most of them could be solved if the government stopped interfering in the energy, transmission and transportation business. Your government has already screwed your country up enough time for them to be shut down.
“They surely wouldn’t be so sneaky and underhanded?”
The fact that you even ask the question tells you what the answer is.
No! The AI industry needs to earn the money.
because they’re doing real time surveillance for nothing?
It seems to me that these subsidies in general are just an underhanded excuse to generate higher tax revenues under the guise of introducing green technologies. Meanwhile it’s the consumers who get stuck with higher costs. The subsidies of EVs are a typical example. Governments introduced carbon pricing to raise the money to provide the subsidies. Meanwhile auto producers jacked up EV prices figuring that the incentives offered would entice consumers to buy them to do their part in saving the planet. Except consumers soon noticed that even with these incentives EVs were still more expensive than their gas/diesel counterparts and were proving less reliable. So it’s no wonder that EV sales in North America have been dropping and producers cutting back on production. So could it also be that AI demand isn’t what it’s cracked up to be but taxpayers are still stuck with the costs to continue the subsidies?
Well we do need some AI or something if the there isn’t much intelligence around-
Electric fire truck ‘fail’ – after costing taxpayers millions | Auto Expert John Cadogan
Same story different but predictable location.