Australia needs to build its own domestic AI capability. To do so, it must first develop and build more of its own data centres across the country.

AI is the technology of both today and tomorrow. We’ll fall behind the world if we don’t make the most of it.

There is a push from CSIRO, pockets of government and the private sector for Australia to develop its own sovereign AI capabilities. Doing so will provide Australia with the domestic capabilities and leave us less dependent on overseas systems. But we’re not off to the best start.

ChatGPT, the main headline generator in the world of AI, has little to do with Australia other than the fact that people here use it. And in using it, they help to train the OpenAI’s models themselves without any direct benefit in return. We also don’t make the equivalent of NVIDIA’s AI chips here and it’s wildly unlikely we ever will.

It has now become more recognised that keeping the benefits of investment here is essential to ensuring we have a stake in a technology that will dominate industry for the next century. In doing so, we will be at the centre of whatever untold future-dominating technologies emerge.

After all, we have seen the same process already happen in our own lifetimes. The internet, personal computers and cloud computing have all radically altered our lives. With AI, those same types of changes can become supercharged.

In doing this, it also means we must secure the data used to better train AI and align that training with the nation’s rising data sovereignty requirements.

This is where sovereign AI meets data sovereignty.

The ability to store and manage data from within our own shores is a national security requirement. As a critical consideration for compliance with local and global data protection standards, Australia is highly dependent on offshore data storage systems for even some of its most crucial data assets. This is a consequence of the advent of cloud computing.

But sovereign AI won’t be sovereign if it relies on foreign data. It must be fed by data that’s in Australia.

Given the sheer amount of data we’ll need to create a domestic AI capability, Australia must first invest in data centres across the country. These centres will then be connected only within the borders of the nation and with no data to traverse beyond the land girt by sea. These will be essential to house, store and protect the data needed for AI to be effective and to adhere to data sovereignty standards.

One key constraint is the sheer level of additional power, storage and computing required. This constraint is staggering compared the pre-AI era. Thus, large-scale data centres on hectares of land will be required. While we are seeing large-scale private investments into data centres locally, we’ll need more. Data centre planning, approval and construction can take many years, and many of the facilities already in the pipeline were envisioned at a time before AI became mainstream. Direct government help to plan, build and fund these centres will be necessary.

But we’ll also need to see more data storage on premises. This is necessary to ensure that the data required is certainly sovereign and unable to be parsed through international servers. It can be done with data lakes, repositories of huge amounts of data from multiple sources ripe for analysis, stored within modern on-premises environments in one or multiple office sites.

This is not a new idea. Large-scale multi-city offices are quite common for large corporations. Ensuring data sovereignty due to the private nature of these deployments is vital.

Australia has a successful ICT services industry. With a handful of remarkable success stories like Canva and Atlassian, it has built a globally recognised brand. But at its core, Australia’s success is still propped up by the world around it.

While the eventual benefits of AI are still unknowable, we know what it can do for the present. In areas where Australia has deep investment, such as mining and decarbonisation, AI can filter through data to find what humans cannot. It can find the conclusions that will lead to better safety standards, create new products, find new veins and figure out new ways to do business.

Our fate on AI comes down to the data, plain and simple. If we don’t have our sovereign data ecosystems in place, we won’t have a sovereign AI success story to tell. If we don’t have a sovereign AI, we will be forced to use someone else’s. And they will get to use our data more effectively than us.

Private enterprise and government leaders need to seriously ramp up their sovereign data capabilities to help drive our AI future. Otherwise we risk being left behind by others who have already realised its potential and whose investment thus far leaves Australia in the dust.