People power in suburbs exposes fragility of AI boom
Shares in data centre operator NEXTDC fell 42 per cent in a single day after the company revealed that delays in getting power to a proposed expansion of its massive complex in inner-west Melbourne meant its future earnings would be cut by a third.
A neighbourhood dispute and an act of civil disobedience, residents parking their cars in the street to deny trucks access, had stopped the march of industrial-scale power poles that would provide the juice for the next stage of the data centre.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-23/nextdc-downgrade-sees-people-power-hit-for-multi-billion-firm/107293706Open linkView original on aussie.zone
6 replies
Also please note that these places run on Diesel Generators.
The reason truckies can’t afford to get fresh produce onto supermarket shelves is because all the diesel is being snapped up by these arseholes. The price of diesel has nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with Techbros. (By “nothing”, I mean very little. The techbros are keeping the Hormuz situation at a boil as a scapegoat.)
What? No they don't. Holy hell, that would cost 100x what running on the grid costs them.
They have diesel generators as a backup they can fire up in the case of a power outage to maintain their service. But most of the time those generators are used once a year to test their systems. They certainly don't run on them all the time.
At critical sites, most generators are fired up monthly for at least a 15 minutes. Most companies hate doing that because of the cost but do it to keep their tier 4 rating.
I think all of NextDC are tier4 which means they have redundancies and fault tolerance to keep 99.999% uptime (about 5 minute outage per year).
I don't understand all the NextDC hate though. They are the Australian DC company that just supplies each space to other businesses and government agencies. NextDC don't runs servers that mine your data or generate shitty videos, they supply space to for businesses to run servers. Go hate on Microsoft or Amazon for their massive datacentres that not only kill the environment but sell out our privacy as well.
I'm familiar with Next DC. I spent a weekend moving our data centre into P1. We've spread to P1 and P2, now. I didn't know they fired up their genies every month, though. That actually seems like overkill. Before moving into Next DC, we used to do it annually during the September long weekend, coinciding with power works in the building that always happened that weekend.
I'm not 100% with M3 (Footscray complaint one) but I've seen the M2 (Tullamarine) ones fire up regularly enough. M1 (Fishermen's Bend) fires up fairly regularly though I don't know the exact clocking.
I feel for the Tullamarine residents more than Footscray though. Sharps Rd Tullamarine will have 3 huge data centres; NextDC and Vantage bordering houses and then Air trunk ~800m up the road. Imagine when all 3 generator test coincide.
Ther a a lot to hate about AI datacentres, but as Nath also points out, they don't run always on diesel.
Don't let them strawman us.