AirTrunk, founded in Australia in 2015, operates 11 data centres across seven cities and five markets in the Asia Pacific region. Its customers include large cloud technology and artificial intelligence companies.
Whitelaw said the company already matches 86% of its energy use in Australia with renewables, but acknowledged more work was needed across the sector.
Whitelaw referenced figures from the Clean Energy Council estimating that data centres currently represent approximately 2% of National Electricity Market (NEM) demand, a figure it projects could rise to around 10% by 2050. It was almost no surprise that this rising demand made data centres something of a “buzzword” across the two-day event, where it featured across multiple panel discussions.
Whitelaw framed that growth within the broader context of an electricity system already under pressure from coal retirement, transport and industrial electrification, and population growth.
“Australia needs to build at an unprecedented scale. We need substantially more generation, storage, and transmission, regardless of whether another data centre is approved,” she says.
