Where should your AI live? Why Sovereign data centres matter
On a recent trip across three U.S. cities, I witnessed Waymo’s autonomous vehicles in action—driverless cars effortlessly navigating the busy streets of San Franciso, LA and Austin Texas to safely get people to where they need to go. AI is not some future concept, AI is here, now.
AI is transforming business.
Here in Australia, AI is being used across industries, transforming how organisations operate.
- Healthcare: Royal Perth Hospital’s HIVE AI system continuously monitors vitals for at-risk patients, flagging anomalies instantly to a central command centre where staff can communicate directly with medical teams.
- Banking: Commonwealth Bank uses AI to read, analyse and process customer documents quicker and streamline internal operations, greatly enhancing efficiency and service delivery.
- Transport: Sydney Airport has partnered with Google to launch an Augmented Reality application that uses AI for real-time wayfinding assistance, breaking language barriers and improving passenger experience.
AI is streamlining tasks and unlocking new possibilities, at the heart of AI is a company’s critical data, it’s digital intellectual property (IP).
Protecting your Company’s most valuable asset, it’s data.
AI’s ability to decipher meaning from unstructured and structured data, has made a company’s data more valuable than ever. Protecting this intellectual property is paramount.
Similarly to when you set up your cloud infrastructure, when setting up the foundations for AI, organisations need to consider where their data will be kept? Who has access to this data? What jurisdictions and laws will your data/IP and AI be governed by?
Governments worldwide are introducing regulations to protect their nations’ most sensitive and critical data. Such regulation begins with a focus on requiring the most important data to be kept onshore and, in the most sensitive cases, only be stored in sovereign data centres. In Australia, the SOCI Act places regulations on data management by critical infrastructure companies. These regulatory requirements are more easily achieved when that data is stored in data centres that are sovereign to Australia. Globally, laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act enforce strict data governance measures to ensure the data sovereignty of these nations is secured.
Why Sovereign Data Centres Reduce Risk and Cost.
The risks of not securing data are monumental. Company and citizen data breaches, ransomware, unauthorised access and foreign interference can lead to financial penalties, operational disruptions, reputational damage. All factors which impact a company’s bottom line.
Sovereign data centres are the frontline of defence against these threats. They ensure:
- Security through onshore processing and storage: Data remains within national borders, protected by local laws and free from foreign influence.
- Easier to do business with: By upholding regulatory compliance it’s easier to align with the ever-evolving sovereignty regulations required to do business in Australia
- Reducing cost: Helping organisations avoid costly fines and maintain uninterrupted operations, and in the worst case scenario having to move your IT infrastructure out of a facility that doesn’t meet your changing compliance needs in the future. This exercise is not only costly, but extremely risky.
- Increase revenue: Maintaining compliance with data sovereignty opens your business up to new opportunities by having the widest possible customer base to sell to, including the Australian Government and global customers who want to sell to them.
Partnering with a sovereign provider means securing the backbone of your operations, ensuring peace of mind in a world with increasingly complex geopolitical tensions and increasing cyber-attacks.
There are little to no downsides of choosing a sovereign data centre, while the benefits are substantial. The choice is clear. In the past, no one ever got fired for choosing IBM. But in the future, you may get fired for NOT choosing a sovereign data centre.
Future-proofing as regulations tighten.
Choosing a sovereign data center partner is a strategic decision that will secure an organisations future in an evolving regulatory landscape. As laws around data sovereignty continue to tighten globally, this foresight protects businesses from the legal and financial ramifications of non-compliance, as moving IT operations into a compliant data centre later down the track is a risky and costly procedure.
Not all sovereign data centres are created equally.
Not all sovereign data centres can handle the requirements of intensive AI workloads. The high-density power and cooling demands for AI can only be supported in purpose-built AI and cloud data centres. These data centres meet ultra high-density power requirements, accommodate new technology such as hybrid air and liquid cooling and have been designed from the ground up to support powerful AI engines.
The right sovereign AI and cloud data centre should not only have the appropriate accommodations for the needs today, but also offer the flexibility and scalability to meet future requirements.
This is why Macquarie Data Centres newest sovereign data centre, IC3 Super West is being purpose-built for AI and cloud. The hybrid air and liquid cooled facility is currently under construction at our Macquarie Park Data Centre Campus in North Sydney, on track to be ready for service in mid-2026. It has the entire end state power secured and brings the total campus IT load to 63 Megawatts.
The backbone of our AI-driven future.
As AI and cloud continue to impact every person in every company in every industry, the role of AI-ready, sovereign data centres cannot be underestimated. They are the backbone of our AI-driven future.
