Why data centres are the next big commercial investment

Transcript

00:00There's a really significant kind of commercial investment that the Australian market is talking about at the moment.

00:05It powers your day-to-day life, but it's quite possible you've never even thought about it.

00:10If you live anywhere near a city or a town centre, then the chances are that you are driving past data centres on the daily.

00:17What look like essentially big warehouses are actually full of servers where anything that you ever send as a message,

00:24type in Google, FaceTimes that you make, bank transactions all get sent to.

00:30Basically, these huge servers have a bunch of equipment that allows data to be effectively stored and accessed

00:36so that you and everyone else can access the internet.

00:39If you ask Knight Frank, this industry is expected to be worth $4 trillion US by the year 2030.

00:45And in 2024, Australia was the second top location for investment in data centres.

00:49It was only topped by the US and there was $6.7 US billion put into data centres in Australia last year.

00:57Now, these centres also create a lot of jobs.

01:00There's expected to be about 8,300 new jobs generated in the industry by 2030,

01:05which would bring it up altogether to about 17,000 roles.

01:09The capacity of data centres is also expected to more than double from 2024 to 2030 in Australia.

01:14But you might be thinking, why is this suddenly such a big industry?

01:18Obviously, it's been kicking around for a while, but from now until 2030 again,

01:23the amount of devices connected to the internet in Australia is expected to almost double.

01:27And our population obviously is expanding as well, not just in numbers, but in geographical location.

01:33Data centres are generally located just outside of cities so that they're close enough to be able to do a really effective job

01:39for mass populations, but they kind of capitalise on cheap land and assets.

01:44Sydney and Melbourne are the places where data centres are growing most rapidly in Australia,

01:48but regional areas, particularly Canberra and Perth, are also big for this.

01:53It's important in Canberra, particularly because of a large public service population

01:57and the fact that defence has to power a lot and store a lot of data.

02:01A lot of new housing developments, particularly if they're major ones with thousands of people moving in,

02:05now have their own data centres being built as well.

02:08So if you're interested in the commercial market at all, this is definitely something to stay on top of

02:13because no doubt there's going to be rapid expansions into 2025.