Expert calls for tighter scrutiny of data centres' water consumption

0:00They sent it inquiry, looking into artificial intelligence and data centres has kicked off hearings this week in Sydney's Lower North Shore, where a bit of a data centre boom is underway. Energy use and environmental impacts on local community are top of the agenda, as well as questions about how the government would ensure that information passing through these data centres would benefit Australians. The Senate inquiry continues today in Melbourne in the inner suburb of Yarraville. Dr Rob Nichols is Senior Research Associate at the University of Sydney. He spoke at yesterday's public hearing and joins me now. Rob, welcome to breakfast. Good morning. How important is this inquiry? It's important for different groups to be able to put positions on data centres. But it is also one of a number of AI and our centre inquiries that are going on at the moment. One in the Senate, one in both houses and one from the Prime Ministers Department.

1:07What are we seeing in places like the Lower North Shore of Sydney with the proliferation of data centres and the response from local businesses, councils and residents? I think initially there was not really very much of an understanding of how big an impact data centres would have, laying cove in the Lower North Shore has lots of light industrial units. And the first ones look like more of these. But now there's a bit more of a realisation that data centres can have a local impact on the local environment and particularly that this area, it's very, very close to a national part. Excuse me. You spoke at yesterday's public hearing. What were some of the key items you raised? The need for there to be some sharing of the compute that becomes into data centres.

2:09So data centres have a lot of processing power. And at the moment the trade off seems to be, well, we're bringing with our own energy, that's great. We'll make sure that we have no net impact on water. That's also great. But that's the bottom 10% of the stack. The real value is in the computing power itself. And along with a number of academics, I propose that we actually have a mechanism to share the benefit of that compute for all Australians rather than that benefit simply being exported. How do we do that in a rigorous commercial environment? Basically you say, you allow people to say, percentage, let's say it's 3% of the compute capacity at all data centres should be made available and essentially create a secondary

3:10market and the logic would be that a number of businesses getting together would provide access to computers, a single data centre in order to meet their sharing of compute that's a requirement for building data centres. What might those benefits look like for everyday Australians? There is the issue that if you're running a data centre that's doing a very large training run, that training run might only be available to customers in, for example, the US. It might only be available to certain government agencies in the US. The idea is that that compute adds to our national security, our national capability and ensures that Australia is able to be part of the leadership in NAI rather than being a country that simply buys AI capacity from international businesses.

4:16You're listening to Radio National Breakfast, are you hearing from Dr Rob Nichols, a senior research associate at the University of Sydney? We're talking about data centres. We often focus on energy and the potential strain on Australia's energy grid. What do we know about the drawdown of water and power to power these data centres? I think we've got two different sets of data centres. One that's are existing at the moment where power comes from the grid, water comes from drinking water supply, but the new data centres are being in alignment with their prime ministers, speech a couple of months ago, are going to bring your own energy, bring your own water. We don't actually need drinking water to call it our centre.

5:16So using grey water, using water collected from the surfaces of solar panels is likely to be much more of the way that the very big data centres, the ones that are outside of the city rather than being close in, will bring your own energy, bring your own water offering and that's very different from the ones today. What happens to the water that's been used by the data centres afterwards? So if I'm a data centre operator, what I really want to do is call that water back down and use it again. And the reason for that is that water costs money, so I reduce my costs. One of the critical things is even if that water goes back into the wastewater system, it needs to be called first. And so if you're going to call it, why not just reuse it?

6:20So the key thing is to try and keep a close circuit water system rather than creating wastewater. The water that's expelled doesn't exist essentially as clean as it was when it went in, so there's no additional change. So if you're using grey water in, you get grey water out. If you're using drinking water in, drinking water out. Just finally, what do you make of US President Donald Trump's address to the UN General Assembly? He's rejected a push from more than a dozen countries, including Australia, for global safeguards for AI. I think we need safeguards for AI, the issue that anthropic itself raised of what's called recursive self-improvement, the fact that AI systems can build better AI systems without human intervention. It means we just have to be careful and setting some guardrails agreed internationally as one

7:23solution. I think ultimately the businesses that a US based will follow that solution regardless of what the president says. It isn't impossible to slow down a commercial and industrial race between powers like the US and China. It is on a commercial basis. It may not be in a military basis. So having guardrails on commercially offered systems is actually a safety feature that sells. Having guardrails on military oriented AI systems is much, much less likely. Rob Nichols, thank you. Thanks, Sally.