Deloitte report outlines Australia as potential digital infrastructure leader
Deloitte has argued that Australia is well placed to lead the Asia Pacific on digital infrastructure, an opportunity the firm calculates as being potentially worth $134 billion to the local economy.
Commissioned by Google, the report from Deloitte Access Economics contends that Australia with its access to available land, renewable energy, resources and the required workforce has the necessary foundations to become a regional hub for digital infrastructure.
Should Australia capitalise, such a status could be worth up to $134 billion in cumulative GDP over the next 25 years, while also creating an average of 14,300 additional jobs per year. To do so however, Deloitte says the country must act now to get ahead of the game.
“Data is the new oil of the modern economy and compute power is the engine, while artificial intelligence is the technological breakthrough of a generation and its promise of economic returns is driving significant global investment,” said Deloitte Access Economics leader Pradeep Philip. “Australia can and must become an AI nation to build economic prosperity by driving productivity.”
According to the firm, investments in AI technology will exceed $165 billion by 2028 in the Asia Pacific alone, requiring the digital infrastructure to match. Already, local data centre capacity is expected to grow to 3.3GW before the end of the decade, but Deloitte’s proposal would see an almost doubling of that figure, with a further 3.1 GW of ‘AI-ready compute’ added to the baseline.
In addition to the direct impact on Australia’s tech, digital and communications sector, the physical investments into data centres, sub-sea and terrestrial cables and utilities would also spread throughout the economy, from construction and mining to clean energy and professional services, which combined with wider productivity gains could be worth as much as $134 billion to 2050.
Globally, the number of hyper-scale data centres doubled between 2018 and 2023, as per figures cited by Deloitte, with capacity expected to triple again before the decade is out, more than 70 percent which will cater to AI. With half of the world’s GDP also projected to be concentrated in the Asia Pacific by mid-century, Deloitte presents the opportunity as obvious.
Australia too, which in 2024 attracted the second-highest rate of data centre investment behind the US, is forwarded as boasting several natural advantages compared to other countries in the region, scoring highly on metrics such as land, capital and labour to rank overall alongside Indonesia and Thailand, while some issues as to water, electricity and regulation will still need to be addressed.
Also required, just over $50 billion in additional private investment and up to 60 new data centres, supported by the generation of 3.7 GW worth of extra clean energy (the equivalent generation capacity of four new wind farms), sub-sea data transfer capacity equivalent to one additional cable, 3,000 more trained construction workers, and of course complementary regulation.
Taken together, these investments and the combined effort of industry and government could also deliver a broader range of benefits beyond the straighter economic numbers, such as in making the country more resilient and secure through fortified cybersecurity and advanced decarbonisation, while at the same time elevating Australia’s global status as a knowledge economy.
But, Deloitte says, time is critical; “With decisive action, this expansion is technically feasible by 2030, but the investment decisions are being made now. Once built, countries with the right infrastructure will capture an outsized share of the economic benefits of the next technological wave. Failure to capitalise could see Australia miss out on a significant economic opportunity.”
