The build out of data centres across Australia is now facing community backlash, at a time when AI enablement is being mandated across many government agencies. The rift defines a territory for AI Civics (agentic_civics) to ask which version of AI sovereignty we are signed up for.
Civic interplay is meant to be a quiet set of reflections on what it means to become-citizen in an era of planetary-scale AI systems.
Except the question of whose sovereignty citizens are interfacing with keeps going unresolved, to the point that situations on the ground are becoming increasingly strained. Decidedly not-quiet, even.
Living during the build out
The magical properties of cloud computing and agentic intelligence seem to be descending from their ethereal states. They are now encroaching on the grounds we guard closely - for housing, for water, for energy, for life.
“No! You can’t go there!” shout the people. Most people don’t want these data centres competing for scarce resources. Many people say they didn’t sign up for this AI revolution.
But this is the expression of National AI Sovereignty. This is Australia looking after its local compute capacity. This is our hyperscalers ensuring we benefit from the rapid emergence of agentic intelligence, and can participate in the new frontiers of global science and innovation.
The conflicting agendas are hard to ignore, especially for those of us interested in the versions of digital citizenship and AI capabilities being enacted and role-played during this emergent agentic age.
Such role-playing work is exactly what Civic Interplay is most interested in. Not ‘digital civics’ as we have known it, familiar to the era of Web 1.0 or 2.0 or even the platform era, but the version of citizenship we might enact when we understand how deeply many trusted institutions have cognitively-offloaded potential policy pathways for agentic-intelligence to those already foreclosed by the hyperscalers.
This version of citizenship - one mindful of this state of cognitive offloading - seeks a comparative global agenda that maps alternate possible pathways for AI sovereignty, forged through experimental relations between citizens, states, hyperscalers and local ecosystems.
It takes into consideration the many troubles naturally associated with competing claims of sovereignty that underpin this emergent agentic era. Being able to listen, watch, pay attention to and even enact multiple kinds of becoming-citizen in this agentic-age is the work to be done, when the territory is still unclear.
What the map does
This live infrastructure tracker maps the fast-tracking of data centre approvals across Australian states and territories. The tracking is informed by the idea that data centres are expressions of AI Sovereignty, an agenda led by hyperscaling AI companies to claim territorial control in the name of compute capacity.
AI Sovereignty is not a neutral term, and indeed many of us citizens may in fact agree with the need for AI Sovereignty, in the form of reliable access to localised AI capabilities spanning AI compute infrastructure, local AI capabilities, and AI models.
The point here is therefore not to oppose the AI Sovereignty agenda, but instead to understand that how it lands matters. It is not a ‘one size fits all’ and it does not have to be the version mandated by hyperscalers. There are curatorial decisions to be made, about the relative weighting of investments in compute, chips, capabilities and civic-intelligence associated with agentic-workflows.
Land, resources, models, data and capability are all part of an AI Sovereignty stack that can be shaped differently, depending on the governance priorities in place.
The map here demonstrates that Australia is opting for an approach that replicates the same poor fiscal management of the mining boom, allowing the extraction of critical minerals and resources without attendant investment in localised AI innovation hubs or models. While some nascent investment is underway in these fields, the scale is heavily weighted towards the resource extraction approach.
The map aims to make this situation visible. It tracks data centres, mines, refineries, and links these to localised environmental conditions. It also tracks ownership and approval structures, and the associated public debate forming around each site.
Open the live map, or read over at Notion how the project works.
The question is not whether to use AI systems - they’re embedded in all our digital workflows now, no? - but what kinds of digital sovereignties, and by implication, what kinds of digital citizenship, are being fostered through infrastructure roll-out and the mandate to grow AI capabilities using hyperscaler models. Through a comparative agenda it will, in turn, be possible to see that there are many potential versions of AI sovereignty coalescing as new alliances foster distinct models and capabilities.
Please note: This work is in the emergent-state. Do get in touch if you would like to collaborate; it’s an open field.