By Peter Gartside
In February this year a company called CDC announced the construction of a data centre in Laverton ‘set to generate thousands of local jobs and inject more than $2.7 billion into the economy during construction’. Federal, state and local government representatives welcomed this seemingly impressive development.
Great news for the West, right? Well, maybe. Firstly, how many people know that there are already at least half a dozen data centres in our patch? In fact, pretty soon there will be four within a tight 3 km2 area in Maribyrnong, all close to residential areas. Behind the clean, anonymous, high-tech facades, what do we really know about data centres?