Goodman Groupโs plan for a $1.2 billion data centre in Lane Cove West drew 374 public submissions. Nine were in favour.
On Monday, Australiaโs biggest listed property company gave up. It told the NSW planning department it would no longer pursue Project Mars, a 90-megawatt facility that would have sat about 20 metres from the nearest home and 160 metres from Lane Cove West Public School.
Goodmanโs letter said the policy and regulatory environment for large data centres had โevolved significantlyโ, and that it had weighed those changes against the views of the local community.
Project Mars is the third data-centre proposal withdrawn in Australia in five months. Community campaigns sank the $600 million GreenSquare project in the Perth suburb of Hazelmere in May, and a proposal in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains in June. Meanwhile, other developers are digging in: AirTrunk is actively scaling up its planned 1.2-gigawatt campus at Kemps Creek in Sydneyโs west, despite similar community backlash.
Sydney alone has 41 state-significant data centre projects in the pipeline, 18 already approved. Anthropic is negotiating a $21 billion commercial deal with private developers to make Australia a regional hub for running its AI inference models.
The computing infrastructure to power artificial intelligence the industry wants has to be built next to someone. If the neighbours can now stop it, where it goes has suddenly become a multibillion-dollar national problem.
Too much heat
Sasha Titchkosky, a spokeswoman for the Lane Cove Responsible Planning Group, said she was โecstaticโ. She credited six months of campaigning, a run of bad press for Goodman, a shareholder resolution the group lodged last week, and the Senate hearing that followed.
โLast week was really the straw that broke the camelโs back,โ she told this masthead. โIt was just too much heat.โ
The campaign had been building since at least May, when the groupโs petition passed 1134 signatures and its members gave evidence to the NSW parliamentโs data centre inquiry. Stefano Lauria, one of the residents who first contacted this masthead, wrote then that he worked in AI himself. The group was not opposed to data centres in principle, he said, only to this site.
At the federal Senate inquiryโs first public hearing last week, Liberal senator Sarah Henderson told Goodmanโs general manager of developments Ben McGilp that the proposal showed โcontempt for local residentsโ and asked him to withdraw it on the spot. Goodman withdrew it five days later.
The stateโs utilities also had their doubts. Sydney Water said it could not support the project without more detail on its water demand. Ausgrid raised electrocution and fire risks. The plans included a million litres of diesel stored on site.
Titchkosky said the business park was built for light industry, and data centres are nothing of the sort. They run diesel back-up generators and emit noise โ24 hours a day, seven days a weekโ, she said.
Americaโs facts
For most of this year the industry has argued that Australian anger is borrowed. Belinda Dennett, chief executive of Data Centres Australia, said in a March speech that the local debate was being fought on Americaโs facts. The US has about 5400 data centres; Australia has 252.
Titchkosky called the industryโs early response, that there was โnothing to see hereโ because Australia had always had data centres, โreally disingenuousโ.
Dennett struck a different note on Tuesday. โThe policies under which developers commenced approval processes are changing. Community expectations are also changing,โ she told this masthead.
Community backlash against data centres has already reached fever pitch in the US. A Gallup poll in March found 70 per cent of Americans opposed a new AI data centre in their own neighbourhood. In July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul imposed the first statewide pause on large data centre permits. Texas followed in August, freezing new approvals until its grid is audited. Dennett warned that until governments settle the rules, more data centre customers, investors and developers are likely to โadopt a wait-and-see approach to Australiaโ. Her group supports a national approach to regulation, more engagement with communities, and faster approvals. โBut data centresโ customers and investors have choices, and many countries are actively encouraging investment,โ she said.
Wherever thereโs a power connection
Victoria is moving to require 150-metre buffers between data centres and homes. NSW has introduced a 75-day fast track for projects that fund their own extra water and power supply. It sets no minimum distance from anyoneโs house.
Titchkosky wants siting rules based on evidence. She also wants designated data centre precincts, with the infrastructure, probably including recycled water, built in from the start.
โJust siting them anywhere where there happens to be a power connection is really not the right way to go about this,โ she said. โItโs giving the industry a bad name and really impacting the social licence of the industry.โ
The international consultancy CT Group has already told its clients that local opposition is now the decisive risk in getting a data centre built. The Lane Cove group belongs to a national alliance of communities fighting data centres.
Titchkosky said Mondayโs result had given the others โsome energy and some hopeโ.
Her neighbours are planning a street party once one of their core organisers gets back from holiday. Titchkosky has a test for the next developer eyeing a business park beside homes. โProponents should ask themselves, if I was in the residentsโ shoes, would I want that data centre built there?โ she said.
โIf itโs so hard to explain, and if you canโt enunciate the benefits, then maybe that is an indication that the data centre doesnโt belong there.โ
Itโs a question her neighbours will likely be asking again soon. Up the road from where they are planning a party, AirTrunk is still seeking approval for a 37-metre, 140-megawatt data centre on Mars Road.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
