Atlassian co-founder says Australia could be major data centre hub for South-East Asia
While his Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes struggles to advance his planned Suncable project to generate vast amounts of solar energy in the Northern Territory and send it via an underwater cable to Singapore, Mr Farquhar has proposed a different way for Australia to export its green energy.
"We should power the region," he said in a speech to the National Press Club.
"We should export megawatts as megabytes for potentially megabucks. This could be a $10 billion-plus opportunity."
Speaking to The Business ahead of his speech, Mr Farquhar said he envisaged Australia becoming the data centre location of choice for South-East Asia, a region hungry for data and becoming hungrier as artificial intelligence took off.
"There are more users of ChatGPT in the combined Indonesia and Vietnam than there are in the United States," he told the program.
"This region is growing, it's dynamic in Asia, so there's going to be a lot of demand for data centres going forward."
Mr Farquhar explained why Australia was uniquely well placed to host the data centres necessary to store all this information.
"Abundant energy, clean energy, and the other one is a stable rule of law," he argued.
"In this increasing world of geopolitics, our access to cutting-edge chips at the behest of the United States is an advantage for us."
Mr Farquhar also said Australia was surprisingly cost-competitive when it came to building and operating data centres.
"I found it surprising because, obviously, we have a relatively high cost of labour," he told The Business.
"But because we have a deep talent pool here, because of the low cost of energy and clean energy that we have in Australia, and the ability to scale up with raw materials, all those things actually put us in a great and very competitive situation in the world stage.
"And so I was honestly surprised at how competitive Australia is.
"Again, we just need improved planning approvals to move faster both on the energy and approving of data centres."
As one of the small group of people hand-picked to attend the Economic Reform Roundtable at Parliament House in Canberra on August 19-21, he will have an opportunity to present these arguments directly to the federal government.
With the major data centre operators and cloud-computing providers committed to renewable energy, according to Mr Farquhar, he argued his plan could accelerate the clean energy rollout.
"So this revolution will be powered by green energy, and nuclear might be here in 10 years, but it's not going to be here anytime soon," he said.
"And so, as a result, it's really going to be solar, wind and batteries that are going to power this revolution.
"And what we're seeing is that you can actually install solar, wind and batteries very quickly once you can get through all the approvals. And so my call on government is to make it easier for us as a nation to install this power that we need."
In his speech, Mr Farquhar also called for another regulatory change to facilitate an expansion of the data centre industry in Australia.
"Australia's copyright laws are out of sync with the rest of the world," he argued.
"Today, large language model providers don't want to train their models in Australia.
"We are in a perverse situation where copyright holders aren't seeing any more money, but we also don't see the economic upside of training models in Australia."
Responding to concerns that the growing number of data centres was already placing strains on Australia's energy grid, and potentially pushing up power prices, Mr Farquhar said he believed that the increasing and reliable demand for power could have the opposite effect.
"What happens is, as the grid gets larger, it becomes more stable," he told The Business.
"There's more points of access putting energy in more, pulling it out, and so the grid can actually become cheaper the more things you connect to it.
"So a grid that powers more data centres, additional to the electricity needs of the nation, is going to be more stable and cheaper."
Overall, Mr Farquhar used his speech to urge Australians and their political leaders to embrace artificial intelligence, rather than fear it.
"Just as we don't lament that fewer people toil in fields, we won't lament that fewer people answer repetitive questions in call centres," he argued.
"But the history of technological change shows us something important: Every major technological wave has created more jobs than it has displaced. Human capital has adapted and stayed relevant every time."
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