At a glance
Macquarie Data Centres CEO David Hirst opened the day arguing the industry needs to define what data centres actually do for people before policy debates run away from it.
Data Centres Australia CEO Belinda Dennett framed approvals as the binding constraint, calling out "death by round table" and naming Victoria's coordination model as the working counter-example.
NEXTDC's David Dzienciol pressed for an export narrative around Australian compute, with tokens treated as the unit being sold internationally.
Celero Infrastructure founder Damien Sanford argued data centres can absorb the base-load demand that left Australia with the decline in manufacturing, and that local grid expertise is what unlocks new sites.
The AI factory panel returned repeatedly to three constraints: cooling efficiency, tokens-per-watt economics, and a domestic market where the revenue is in inference workloads.
Corinium's Data Centre Exchange Australia drew more than 200 senior decision-makers to Sydney on 26 May 2026: hyperscale developers, neocloud founders, the peak body, a former AEMO chief operating officer, engineering and advisory firms, the analyst houses tracking APAC pipeline data, and the energy, water, fibre and construction partners that sit underneath the build pipeline. The agenda ran four blocks (Australia in the APAC context, speed to market, powering growth, then design and AI factories across two parallel afternoon tracks) before closing with a keynote on collective advancement chaired by Data Centres Australia. More than 30 speakers were on the bill across the day.
Three external developments sat noticeably close to the agenda. CDC's 555MW deal with a United States investment-grade customer was confirmed in the days before. The federal government's national expectations framework for data centres, published on 23 March 2026, is now the reference document for any fast-track application this quarter. And the NSW Legislative Council inquiry into data centres held its final May hearing on 22 May, with a report due by 30 September 2026.
Sovereignty and the social licence
David Hirst's opening fireside chat with DC Byte's James Murphy returned repeatedly to the language of social licence. Macquarie Data Centres, an Australian-listed sovereign infrastructure operator with the recently completed IC3 Super West facility coming on line, has built its market position around government-grade certification and Australian operating control. Hirst argued the industry has been too narrow in how it explains itself to communities: housing data in purpose-built facilities is, on a per-workload basis, the environmentally responsible choice when compared to the unmeasured footprint of on-premise enterprise and government compute.
Belinda Dennett carried the point into the regulatory arena. Her observation that "no one aggregates on-prem energy usage" sat alongside a sharper concern that, when public opinion turns, facts get overruled by sentiment. Dennett framed Australia as a federation that loses to itself in coordination friction, with solutions being delivered too slowly through round-table consultation.
Speed to market and the workforce constraint
The 10:05 keynote panel on speed to market, with Heather Feigin (Equinix), Matt Neil (Datacom), Mary-Catherine Hamill (Aon) and Shalini Lagrutta (DXN Solutions), grounded the policy argument in delivery mechanics. Hamill named resourcing as the binding constraint on Australian build programs, ahead of capital or design capability. Feigin made the case for health and safety performance as a competitive moat Australia already holds.
Matt Neil's contribution, as reported on the day by CRN's Athina Mallis, put a finer point on the position. Australia has "all the advantages" of a build-out location, in Neil's phrasing, including stable state government, strong rule of law, and inbound talent. The constraint sitting against those advantages is the regulatory compliance framework. Local councils, state governments and utilities are not in sync with each other or with the pace of demand, and "we are now seeing the challenges and the bottlenecks coming through". Neil pointed to a recent Western Australian project where the consenting process was supportive, but a downstream consumer-led backlash effectively halted it. His prescription matched David Hirst's earlier point: the industry has to stop talking to itself and start educating the public about what data centres do.
David Dzienciol had pressed a parallel observation on the earlier APAC panel. NEXTDC's argument is that Australian operators need to tell their story better in international forums, and that the unit being exported should increasingly be tokens of inference compute carried by floor space.
The grid, base load and the household cost question
Damien Sanford's panel on powering growth was the day's clearest treatment of the energy story. Sanford, a former AEMO Chief Operations Officer now a partner and founder at Celero Infrastructure, argued that the data centre industry is not yet good at energy, and that no operator can route around the people who hold grid and availability knowledge in each region. Celero's pipeline of roughly 6,000MW of battery energy storage and over 2,000MW of data centre capacity is being scoped against that constraint.
The economic counter-argument was made in the same session. Data centre load can absorb the base-load demand the country lost as heavy manufacturing declined, and that absorption, paired with operator-funded investment in renewable generation, is what eventually pushes household energy bills down. The argument is politically delicate. It is also the case the industry will need to make in submissions to both the federal expectations framework and the NSW inquiry.
AI factories: cooling, tokens-per-watt and the inference economy
The 15:35 panel on next-gen AI factories, neoclouds and hyperscale, with John Henderson (Centuria DC), Andrew Leece (SHARON AI), Bass Salah (ResetData) and Dave Cooper (Zerra DC) under moderator Chris Clarkson, was the operator-heavy session of the day.
Three points held the room. Cooling efficiency is the binding bottleneck, ahead of capital or GPU allocation, and integrating direct liquid cooling into retrofit-grade facilities is the engineering problem the next twelve months will turn on. Bass Salah's framing of tokens-per-watt as the ultimate competitive metric tracked closely with industry commentary out of NVIDIA and Schneider Electric this quarter, and aligns with the AI factory framing that came out of NVIDIA GTC 2026 and with ResetData's positioning as a sovereign neocloud running the AI-F1 supercluster. Andrew Leece was direct that Australia does not have the scale to host training runs for United States frontier model customers, and that the domestic opportunity is inference, served locally. Dave Cooper said the demand signal for AI factories now comes principally from first-party and third-party AI agents.
Collective advancement and the 2030 view
Belinda Dennett, ran on what it takes to collectively advance Australia's data centre ecosystem. The bench brought Lauren Ryder (CEO, Leading Edge Global), Pritesh Swamy (Head of Data Centre Research and Advisory APAC at Cushman & Wakefield), Jack Dan (CDC's Chief Strategy Officer and a member of Data Centres Australia's inaugural board), and Matt Walsh (Chief Customer Officer, Vocus).
Walsh put the connectivity layer at the centre of the panel's argument. "A data centre is only as valuable as the network connecting it," he posted to LinkedIn the same day. The fibre and subsea routes carrying capacity across the country, in his framing, need to be built ahead of compute, with the sequencing as the variable that determines whether Australia can establish itself as a regional digital infrastructure hub for Asia Pacific. That position is consistent with Vocus's stated focus on building digital infrastructure ready when it is needed.
Ryder's leadership at Leading Edge Global brought the regional and edge perspective into a room otherwise dominated by hyperscale Sydney and Melbourne. Swamy's APAC pipeline work at Cushman & Wakefield (his most recent regional figure puts APAC at 19.4GW of disclosed development) sat as the analytical anchor for the 2030 view. Dan represented both CDC and the peak body's inaugural board.