Australia’s Building Data Centres for Big Tech — and Small Businesses Are Paying for It Twice

The Australian Academy of Science just told parliament something uncomfortable: Australia could end up hosting the world’s AI infrastructure while the profits, the IP, and the commercial revenues flow offshore.

And if you’re a small business owner, you’re footing the bill twice.

First, through the energy costs, water usage, and land being consumed by data centres serving global hyperscalers — all of which feed into your operating costs, your council rates, your electricity bills.

Second, every month in AI subscription fees to the same offshore companies running those data centres. Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google. None of them are Australian. None of your subscription money stays here.

Australia’s 2.5 million small businesses are the demand side of this equation. They’re adopting AI fastest, paying per seat, per query, per API call. They’re generating the revenue that justifies building more data centres here. And they get nothing back except a bill.

The Academy is calling for a 2.5% levy on AI providers, hyperscalers, and data centre operators — modelled on Australia’s rural R&D levies, the ones that built world-class agricultural research. It would fund national computing infrastructure and keep intellectual property onshore.

Sally-Ann Williams, speaking for the Academy, put it plainly: “Australia will either be a creator of AI or merely a consumer who hosts infrastructure for others.”

For small businesses, that’s not a national identity question. It’s a pricing question. A creator nation develops AI tools that compete with the offshore platforms. A consumer nation watches those platforms raise prices because there’s no alternative.

The Academy’s proposal is a long game. But doing nothing while data centres multiply and AI revenues flow to California locks small businesses into offshore dependency indefinitely.

There’s one more angle worth watching. The Academy is pushing for mandatory AI safety standards for “high-risk AI agents” operating in Australia. That sounds sensible until you realise nobody’s defined what counts as high-risk. An AI receptionist? An AI bookkeeper? An AI HR tool used by a café chain? If compliance requirements land on the tools small businesses actually use — not just the hyperscalers training frontier models — the bill gets even bigger.

Data centres alone won’t make Australia an AI nation. The Academy is right about that. For small businesses, the more urgent question is whether any of this policy gets built with them in mind — or whether they just keep paying for infrastructure that profits someone else.

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Sources:

• Australian Academy of Science — Data centres alone won’t make Australia an AI nation

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