Public control: Lease underground sites to data centres
The Hazelwood Power Station, east of Melbourne, lies abandoned. The coal-fired operation helped keep the lights on in Victoria until it was decommissioned in 2017. Now the area around the Latrobe Valley site is ripe for another kind of development.
Waste not: Put data centre heat and wires to work
In the small Finnish town of Mantsala, north of Helsinki, residents are kept warm through the long winter by an unlikely source.
Going below: Underground data centres lead the way
Lefdal spreads over 120,000sqm – roughly the size of eight footy fields – and up six levels, with 75 distinct chambers. Yet this data centre in west Norway is barely a blip on the striking Nordic landscape.
Dig deep: The future of data centres in Australia
Lane Cove is a pretty, leafy corner of Sydney. It is also a flashpoint of the increasingly ugly battle over data centres. With five built, approved or in the planning stage in the North Shore suburb, residents fear their community – named one of Australia’s most liveable in 2025 – will be lost to the artificial intelligence (AI) monoliths.