Kathryn House
Hello, and welcome to Talking Property with CBRE. I'm Kathryn House, your podcast host, and in this latest episode, we're going to be discussing data centres. Australia is in a global race for AI infrastructure, but are we positioned to win or are we already falling behind? Capital is flowing, demand is real, but does Australia have what it takes to win workloads before they go elsewhere?
Belinda Dennett
I get a little bit frustrated with the State of Origin lens of which we apply everything in Australia because we're going to miss the opportunity. Investors and customers, internationally, don't differentiate between Sydney and Melbourne. They're looking at Australia as a market.
Kathryn House
That's Belinda Dennett, the cofounder and Chief Executive Officer of Data Centres Australia, the peak body for the data centre sector and ecosystem in Australia. Belinda has more than 20 years’ experience at the forefront of Australia's digital economy and technology ecosystem, including roles at AirTrunk and Microsoft.
Matt Madden
I think we're most at risk by underestimating the opportunity we have ahead of us. And I think that the biggest risk I see is that we just take too long. We just don't have the time to sit back and ponder this. This is stuff that's happening now, and we cement our position.
Kathryn House
And that's Matt Madden, CBRE's Senior Managing Director of Data Centre Solutions for Asia Pacific. Matt leads business development and customer relationships for a specialist CBRE team that assists operators expanding their data centre footprint. I hope you enjoy our conversation. It is a little longer than our usual Talking Property episodes, but there was so much to explore, so please stick with it. There are some great insights from Belinda and Matt. Belinda, welcome to Talking Property. It's been a hugely busy period for you since Data Centres Australia launched last year, so I really appreciate you taking the time out.
Belinda Dennett
It's great to be here, Kathryn.
Kathryn House
And, Matt, great to have you join the podcast. You recently moderated a really interesting CBRE data centres event with Belinda, so I'm looking forward to getting some more of your insights today.
Matt Madden
That's great, Kathryn. Glad to be here.
Kathryn House
So, Belinda, not a day goes by without another Australian media headline about the data centre market as the AI investment boom rolls on. So, taking a step back, can you tell us why you established Data Centres Australia and what role you see the group playing in what I've heard you describe as a $142 billion per annum Australian opportunity?
Belinda Dennett
Well, Kathryn, I think it's what you've just said. There's not a day goes by when there's not a headline. This is now mainstream news. It's in conversations at barbecues. People want to talk about data centres. But there is also a lot of misinformation out there. There's a lot of headlines that get imported from other markets. And so what we felt we really needed was a peak body in Australia to bust some of those myths, put the right information out there, make sure when governments are talking about policy issues that impact whether Australia plays a role in this market or not, that we have industry at the table. And that's been a bit of a challenge because we've had lots of discussion. If you go back to the Economic Roundtable that the treasurer held, there wasn't a data centre company involved yet data centres really led that conversation. So, Data Centres Australia is representing the data centre operators in Australia to represent what's pragmatic and practical, you know, what the challenges are, what the opportunities are to make sure Australia capitalises on this. And so really, we say we're there to advocate for Australia's interests because this opportunity, as you just highlighted $142 billion per annum, it's not too often that that opportunity comes along for a country to transform its economy. We know productivity has been an issue. AI is a solution to that, but Australia really needs to make sure it's competitive in this space.
Kathryn House
And it's interesting because I think what gets forgotten is, and I know myself, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I do Wordle and I share Wordle with a good friend of mine. And that is all, goes through data centres. And I think people sometimes forget in this whole narrative around, you know, this is a money-making exercise, that we all rely on data centres.
Belinda Dennett
Yeah. Look. I think it's interesting. Going back. I was an adviser in the Rudd Gillard governments talking about the National Broadband Network. And back in those days, that was the big infrastructure build out that we had going on in this country to enable our digital economy. Yet we never talked about what that was connected to. We didn't talk about data centres. And part of that was because Australia was so proactive in being a cloud adopter. We didn't have to talk about data centres. And they've existed for 20 years. They've been in this country, we haven't really spoken about them. And it's just now with the growth, with the headlines from overseas, with the investment of capital that people start talking about them. So there is a lack of awareness of just how critical they are. They are critical infrastructure that drives not just the digital economy. The digital economy is the economy. So they are foundational to our economy. We need them, we need them here. But there's also this added opportunity now with artificial intelligence and that's changing our sector and it's put the sector on a pace that we've never seen before. And, really, that's what's at the heart of what's driving the global race, the need for governments to act quickly, that just the speed and pace of change is unlike anything we've seen before.
Kathryn House
Yeah. And so you talk about this pace of change, and, Matt, the market is evolving at light speed. What feels materially different to you versus, say, 18 months ago? I mean, you've got an APAC role, but particularly from an Australian perspective.
Matt Madden
Yeah. It's a good question, and it's a reflection. I I think what we didn't see six years ago, we sort of had COVID hit us, and then the whole world fundamentally changed. And I think that was a big shift of awareness for people around what data centres are and what online means and how you work from home, and we change our operating environments. And one of the things that sort of came really strongly off the back of that was data centre investment. And the data centre investment really hit its straps in about 2024. We started to see a really significant shift in the way data centres were being constructed, the way capital was being consumed. And I think what you're now seeing is an evolution of that again. So 18 months ago, we were sort of seeing design changes happening in data centres. Data centres always think three years ahead because you're thinking about the time for planning and building and the power that you need in order to do that. And, really, what we saw 18 months ago was a dramatic shift from data centre operators or hyperscalers were the customers inside these data centres had gone from taking, let's say, a six megawatt data hall into taking a whole building or to taking multiple buildings on a campus. So the demand loads significantly shifted as they were preparing for their AI workloads that they were going to start to bring in. Unfortunately, infrastructure operates at a slower pace to when we actually see it. So we're actually seeing what was happening three years ago coming through now. What we're going to start to see from this point forward is even greater demand as it goes. So the size of the capital pool is a significant change. The pace in which they want to operate at is a significant change, and the designs of the workloads has changed dramatically as well. So we were going through a predominantly air-cooled data centre where we're blowing lots of air inside of a data hall to keep the computers cool. We've now gone from that into a direct to chip cooling and air cooled at the same time. So we're seeing that combination as we transition to a direct to chip environment. So it's very much technology is driving the change, but it's going at a pace that I have never seen. And the amount of capital that is wanting to be placed into data centres, is a demand that I've never seen before either? Our problem is that we can't keep up with it. We can't keep up with the demand on the grids. We can't keep up with the demands in terms of policy. And I'm sure Belinda's going to cover this one off because she knows it really well. But I am seeing a level of inconsistency across the different states in terms of how they embrace data centres. So if we just talk Australia, Sydney and Melbourne, we certainly see a bit of rivalry there.
Kathryn House
And that's, and we always do this, it's like with sporting teams even, it's all about Sydney versus Melbourne, but this is an Australian race, not a Sydney versus Melbourne race. Belinda, what are your thoughts?
Belinda Dennett
Yeah, I get a little bit frustrated with the State of Origin lens of which we apply everything In Australia because we're going to miss the opportunity. And I'm sure Matt will agree with this, that investors and customers internationally they don't differentiate between Sydney and Melbourne. They're looking at Australia as a market. They want consistency of what the opportunity is, of what the regulatory framework is, and so when we have this sort of play out, internal debates, we are missing the big game. We're competing with India, we're competing with Malaysia, we're competing with Singapore, we're competing with other countries in the region to be that regional hub for AI. I think if you did a quick google, every country in Asia is claiming it wants to be the AI hub for the region. We say that in Australia as well. It's just words unless we're backing that up with policy, with intent, with clarity, and with speed. And speed to market, for me, is the critical issue in everything. How quickly can capital deploy here, how quickly can we build, how quickly can we get through approval processes, how quickly can we get connected to energy and water and the utilities that are needed. How quickly can we get the workforces we need. So all of those things need a coordination. We can't win in one and not the other to win these workloads. So it really is, we need state and federal governments working together. We need local councils on board. That's the, I think the rising threat we're seeing, is that with great attention to our sector comes scrutiny and with scrutiny comes opposition. As I said, there's a lot of misinformation out there and that is driving a lot of the opposition and we need to correct that because we've seen this happen in markets where local concerns, founded or unfounded, do start blocking all those things we've talked about. Speed, capital, clarity of regulation and that's the big risk for us right now.
Kathryn House
So I want to get back to that kind of local angle. How are we placed versus our, you know, Asia competitors when it comes to attracting data centre operators?
Belinda Dennett
What we're talking about now exporting is artificial intelligence. It's tokens. It's knowledge intelligence, and we can build that and create that here in Australia through having the infrastructure and export that to the world. Now, what happens if we don't build the infrastructure here is that we become an importer of AI and intelligence. We don't stop AI, and that's part of that community fear is actually, I don't want AI. I'm fearful of it. If we stop the data centres, we'll stop the AI. We won't stop AI. We'll just import it. We become a client state of a foreign nation. We import AI that has no grounding in Australian values, in Australian laws, in Australian culture. Or, we build the infrastructure here, we create that, and we build the value chain and the jobs and the control and influence over what AI looks like here in Australia. That's what's at stake. So it's actually not that different to what you've just talked about, Matt, in that export opportunity.
Matt Madden
Hundred percent.
Belinda Dennett
That's what we're talking about.
Matt Madden
It is. And I just didn't want to leave that. Now let me come back to you, Kathryn, on what's happening in Asia. Right? Because I think perspective is also really important. What happened in Singapore, and I think this is an important casing note, that Singapore decided to stop data centres being awarded for constructional planning in 2018. Direct result of that, two neighbouring countries popped up. One in Indonesia and one in Malaysia, and they're both within twenty kilometres of Singapore's border. One is Batam, which is an island, a small island off Singapore, and the other one is Johor. Now Johor will overtake Singapore in terms of capacity size within this year. Live capacity. So it's gone from zero to overtaking Singapore, and Singapore's about a gigawatt market today in live capacity. It's gonna overtake that this year in live capacity. Butan, which is nothing. It's really a nothing island in the sense of there's not a lot there. Right? That is becoming a data centre hub as well. So you ask yourself the question, other countries are seeing the opportunity, and they're taking advantage of it. Now what's the attractiveness there of those countries? The planning and the friendliness of government. It's really nothing more. Australia has everything here. We have a reliable grid. We have land, which is less murky than it is in other countries. So we have access to acquiring that land and owning it. Whereas in other countries, that's not necessarily a viable solution. India as an example, huge market, massive market. And in fact, the two things that Mumbai and Melbourne have in common is that they're both the machine learning work areas for Amazon. So these are large, huge data centres that are being built in both of those cities as twin cities. Now in Mumbai, the planning is quite challenging. Ownership of land also has to be through JVs, etcetera. So there's complexity in those markets that aren't here. And the reliability of the grid. So AWS would much rather build data centre capacity in an area where it's more reliable, but they're not gonna pay for it at a massive cost or time to get to market. So that's the real challenge that we have here. So I would say looking around the region, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Thailand is now popping up as well as another friendly location for data centres. But they've still got a gap to what we have here. They have a skills gap that will get solved, over time, but it will get solved. So building the data centres is harder. Australia has a great construction ability, and, you know, I would say it's in the same realms as Japan and the UK. Safety is paramount here. There's some other challenges in some of these other markets, and they are coming up to speed with regulation and building codes, etcetera. So there's challenges, but they all get solved. Money solves a lot of problems, and hyperscalers have plenty of money.
Kathryn House
So, Belinda, what do you see as a real bottleneck when it comes to this Australian rollout?
Belinda Dennett
So I think it's speed, as I said earlier, and that's getting through planning and permitting. The other thing is energy. And energy connectivity is the challenge in every market. This is a scale of investment of build out that we've never seen before. I mean energy demand has been steady or declining over the years and suddenly now with the digital economy, and I make the point before we go further, is that energy demand is not driven by data centres alone. It's actually that aggregated use of tech. So we're using more digital services, we're using digital services like AI that do require more energy. So it's a digital economy aggregation issue, not a data centre issue. And so as we see that we need to be able to build out the grid more quickly, But building out the grid is challenging, it's slow and there's a number of reasons for that. Every country is trying to do it. So there's supply chain challenges for big pieces of energy and there's also workforce challenges and then there's social license community issues of building transmission takes time. But the point I would make and it's kind of where I step in to put the dampener on some of what Matt's said about that enormous demand. This is manageable. And if you look at how data centres, Matt talked about the three-year lag, what we're dealing with now is what was happening three years ago. There is a lag. So what we're seeing in the data is 140 megawatts of live capacity coming on board in Melbourne and Sydney over the next year for the next five years. And that's manageable. It's when people start talking about the 20-gigawatt pipeline that policymakers get nervous. So putting some statistics around what this looks like, I think, is really important as we think about policy and how we adapt and how we can get there and we can make this work?
Kathryn House
It's interesting about the hype angle because I've been reading a lot about phantom demand, and I think that maybe put some fear into people because it's like, there's all this megawatt demand. What does this mean? But I saw this Oxford Economics report, which said that about 85% of these data centre connection requests are speculative and won't actually come into play. So is that fueling some of the fear, do you think?
Belinda Dennett
It absolutely is. And I think because people don't understand how the market works and the market is a little opaque in how it operates because it's so competitive. So if there's a customer and, you know, we've seen in the last couple of weeks the talk about Anthropic coming to Australia. So what is happening is every data centre company wants to win that workload. And so they're putting in applications because they won't sign a contract unless they've got committed energy. So there's multiple companies putting in multiple requests for that same workload. Now when that contract is actually awarded, it's only gonna be awarded, you know, once or to a couple of companies broken up, and so the rest of those applications fall out. So we keep urging people, applications are not a good forecasting tool. Phantom demand is that. It's the speculators who might be wanting to increase the price of a piece of property who will never actually build the data centre. It's multiple applications for the same workload that are done in good faith, but they don't know they have that contract yet. So there's all this noise around applications that aren't real in terms of what that forecast looks like. And then there's the way data centres are built, they're built in phases. So you might have a 300-megawatt data centre, that's not on board on day one. They'll make a data hall available and maybe 30 megawatts will come on board on day one and then that builds out over time. And then there's ramp up rates. So in terms of what the draw on the grid is, it's quite gradual. We're still trying to work out, we know what that looks like for cloud. It's a little bit unknown at this stage of what that looks like for AI, but it's not 20 megawatts on day one. And a lot of the conversations I have with policymakers is really not understanding that and they're thinking they're having to ensure we've got capacity on day one for this huge pipeline that isn't real.
Kathryn House
And I think some of the fear is around things like, you know, water availability, and there's a lot of changes happening in that area of the market. Can you talk us through some of those changes, Belinda? And I know people using non potable water and, you know, I think that's some of the fear factor that comes into the conversation.
Belinda Dennett
Data centres are quite a moderate user of water. Water is used in cooling systems, computers, as you know from your phone, when you use the phone a lot, it gets hot, so they produce heat. It's a byproduct of the compute. We need to get that heat out of a data centre so that the equipment continues to operate. So there's various cooling systems used. Now in Australia, for the majority of the time, air cooling is sufficient. Particularly where I live in Melbourne, it gets cool overnight. We can use air cooling the majority of the time. When it starts to get hotter, traditionally what's been used is evaporative cooling, which does use water. But what we're seeing and the innovation with the new AI chips, with the new ways we're designing data centres, we're seeing closed loop systems, we're seeing liquid chip cooling systems that use either a very minimal amount of water or no water at all. And that's the change and you're seeing a lot of companies commit to that in their new plans. So water will get solved for. There's also a very strong desire to use non potable water sources, but to do that, we need government's help essentially. And in Australia there hasn't been regulation that allows the water authorities to make recycled water available to industry. At the moment it's just flushed out into the ocean, which seems crazy, right? A great use case. So we're working through some of those issues with government. But I think the water issue will get solved, but there is no doubt it gets more than its fair share of attention. And again, that's a lot of it because there's misinformation around that. So part of our role at Data Centres Australia is making sure people have the facts and we're talking about policy with a clear fact base.
Matt Madden
The other thing on the water side of things, is that Australia has a lot of saltwater surrounding the country, and desalination is another option in terms of providing that water to data centres as well. Something that often gets overlooked because the ocean, there are designs that are being absolutely driven now in the US where they're looking at salt water, direct salt water, as a cooling mechanism inside for the cooling because it is closed loop. It doesn't actually hit the chips, etcetera. There is obviously the corrosion aspects that sometimes get drawn out, but there is a way to do that. So there's different options, and technology is being driven that way. So just trying to support the water argument because I don't think it's sensible.
Kathryn House
So, if we take a big step back, Matt, you were recently at the global Nvidia Conference in California, and there was a lot of talk about neocloud operators. And that's becoming a central part of Nvidia's strategy to scale AI infrastructure. Can you explain to our listeners, what's a hyperscaler, what's a neocloud operator, and why is there so much discussion right now about neocloud? And what does that mean for Australia?
Matt Madden
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So a hyperscaler is essentially one of these large tech companies. So on the Nasdaq, they're often referenced as the Magnificent 7. So you'll see them up there, and they're the world's most valuable companies, in terms of their share prices and their values, in the trillions of dollars now. But you'll know their names. So Amazon, and their cloud brand is called AWS or Amazon Web Services. You've got Microsoft, and theirs is Azure. You've got Google, which is, it may be traded as Alphabet, but their brand is Google, and they've got Google Web Services, and the list sort of goes down. You've got Oracle as well and Meta, and most people might know them as Instagram or Facebook. Those companies essentially are called hyperscalers because they scale at a hyper speed. So they build out infrastructure and large infrastructure to support their web platforms. AI or a neocloud is essentially an organisation like ChatGPT or Anthropic, which I think people have now heard of when they announced that, well, they were gonna have now heard who they are. These are companies that are building AI infrastructure that we will then use as humans, or we may use them as what they call agentical agents. So they will make decisions for us or assist us with our daily activities. But all of this sits on the internet. So if you think about the internet as one big connected thing, kind of like that infrastructure that we've been talking about, data centres are part of that ecosystem as our subsea cables, as are our mobile phones, and that all connects together. So the difference is one is a much more established group, and we'll call them the hyperscalers. And then we've got this challenger group now called neoclouds that are coming in and starting to take capacity in there. And I think they're just called neo because they're new.
Kathryn House
Is that shifting, Belinda, with what you're doing through your advocacy work?
Belinda Dennett
Yeah. Look. I think I'd add a couple of things to what Matt said. So we traditionally talked about the tech stack. We sort of had energy as the bottom layer. We had data centres or the infrastructure is the next layer and then you would have a cloud provider as a necessary part of that tech stack and then you'd have apps that run on top of it. So if you think about what you use on your phone, that's sort of the application layer. Some of those are produced by hyperscalers, some of them are not. What we're seeing now with neoclouds is really a new entrant where you don't need the hyperscaler in between because you're renting essentially the GPUs as a service to deliver just AI. So it's slightly different and then you'll still have, so I tend to think of the neoclouds as the think of firmness, Sharon AI, InScale, Callaway, those kind of companies. And then you will still have, like, an Anthropic, foundation model that sits on top of that you might be interfacing with and using. So what we're seeing, and this was sort of part of what we were both talking about earlier, the pace of change is unlike anything we've seen in tech before where it's not just new apps. So for for many years, we saw the apps or a new app every week type thing. We're now seeing the tech stack change and whole new categories of players in the market. So the neoclouds for one, the model builders are another. And and these companies are producing new products weekly. And so this is part of the reason for the demand, the demand now, when you think AI can write its own code, that the scale of product delivery is unlike anything we've seen before. And I was at Microsoft for 12 years and you would know how long you'd be working on a product before it came to market. Now it's weekly, there's something new. And so that's driving this demand that how do we keep up with that if we don't have the infrastructure to run all these new products that people are incorporating into their daily work lives, their social lives, their just how they get by in life. That's the scale at which we're seeing.
Kathryn House
So if we're going to drill it back down, the real opportunity for Australia, if we are serious about leading in AI infrastructure. Belinda, what do you think has to change in the next 12 to 24 months?
Belinda Dennett
For me, the number one is to back the fact that we applaud governments, state and federal, for saying we want this because that wasn't the case perhaps 12, 18 months ago. We see the opportunity, we want this, we now need to back that up with action. We need to back it up with the policy changes, so regulatory certainty. There's lots of things that are uncertain for investors. We need to find a way to build out the energy transition more quickly. We know that was always gonna be difficult. We need a more pragmatic approach to how do we make sure we can do this at the same time as we're attracting that investment, not, hey, we need to pause everything and wait. Let's stop 10 years and build a desal plant so that we've got the water. We need to be able to do more than one thing at once. So that for me is kind of speed and coordination are the two things.
Kathryn House
And, Matt, where are we most at risk of getting this wrong?
Matt Madden
I think we're most at risk by underestimating the opportunity we have ahead of us. And I think that the biggest risk I see is that we just take too long. We just don't have the time to sit back and ponder this, as Belinda put it, from my very crude desalination reference, but we just don't have the chance to wait. Right? This is stuff that's happening now, and we cement our position. We're in a really unique position, I feel, because we're ahead of a lot of the other developing nations right now in terms of their data centre development. We're ahead of that. But we're not gonna be ahead for very long, and I think and that's the point. Do we go back to just Australia digging the stuff out of the ground and selling it to China so that they can turn it into something meaningful, or do we actually start to become the innovative country that we've been that we've invented things before and we've made actual dents in society and we get behind this? Because this is our kids' futures, right, if you wanna look at it that way. It's not gonna be working as a legal admin person or something along those lines because probably an AI agent will take that over. What we need to be driving our kids towards is this. And if you think jobs are gonna go away in terms of trades, I think trades is something that we need to get behind as well. So we need electricians. We need plumbers. We need people to help us look after these facilities. There's so many jobs, and they pay well. They pay really well. I'm gonna hire just from a CBRE perspective, Kathryn, I'm gonna hire 600 people this year across the region. That's a lot of people. And I'm not Ieven looking at the following year, which will probably be more than that again, and that's to just keep up. And they're our customers' demands.
Kathryn House
I mean, because it is, you know, you look at Australia has been ranked, you know, second globally after the US as one of the most attractive destinations for data centre investment. So I guess we're at a real tipping point here, Belinda.
Belinda Dennett
We are, but we cannot have the complacency that I think that sometimes evokes in people. She'll be right. We can wait because we're attractive. When you see the incentives being rolled out in other markets, one of the reasons Malaysia was so attractive was because there were huge incentives rolled out to go and build there, and we're not asking for that. We're not calling on governments to create incentives. We think there's enough opportunity here, but it's speed to market, it's signaling that we're open and we want this and it's making sure that we, our energy and utility connection can happen quickly because whoever can do this most quickly, get the energy and the speed to build together will win in this market. And I'm with Matt, like, we don't just get data centres, we capture the supply chain here. We capture the construction jobs. We capture the ecosystem development, creating new cooling technologies built for the Australian environment. We get operation staff. We get the networking capacity. If we know how to build it, we play a far greater role in being that AI leader than if we're just importing AI services from another market.
Kathryn House
I read something recently where it described data centres as the warehouses of the digital economy, and I think that's definitely how we potentially have to look at it.
Belinda Dennett
So much more, I would say, Kathryn. Factories is how people are calling it. We are creating the AI, not just storing data. That's the massive change from cloud is that you're actually creating the value here with, the data centres are the the creation of the value chain of the content of the intelligence that we export.
Matt Madden
Factory, warehouse, university, primary school, secondary school, grocery store. You don't even need to go to one of those if you don't want to. You can buy all that online and have it delivered.
Kathryn House
I will change my narrative.
Matt Madden
Hey. I was just gonna give you guys,recently, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy released some numbers out on AI. And I think that this is a really good grounding for us to think about, is AI just a flash in the pan or something that we can get past. The hard numbers on AI, and they've not done these before, but they've announced that the AI revenues are $15 billion as a run rate as of Q1 2026. To put that into perspective, AWS's total annual revenue is $142 billion, so their AI revenues are now 10% of their cloud revenues. And this is only something that they've launched in the last couple of years. I think, in addition to that, they added 3.9, and I know this is the hype, Belinda, sorry, I just have to do it. They added 3.9 gigawatts of capacity in 2025. So, in terms of megawatts, that's 39,000 megawatts of capacity last year, so people get used to the megawatts. But they are transforming as an organisation, and they're pushing the button. They're saying their $200 billion investment this year is not an investment. It's just shoring up their long-term revenues. So that's one of the biggest, if not the biggest cloud provider today transforming their AI workloads. And that's a really big demand that we see in Australia. It's still from those hyperscaler companies buying up capacity from the colocation operators.
Belinda Dennett
Can I throw in one bit there, Matt? Just sorry, Kathryn.
Kathryn House
I was going to say that, do you want to have a comeback to that?
Belinda Dennett
Look. I do because I think it's important from an Australian perspective perspective that this isn't just about the hyperscalers. The hyperscalers play a really important role in the local economy. By being an anchor tenant, they allow particularly our Australian data center operators, our CDCs, our NEXTDCs, our AirTrunks, to get the capital they need to build the facility. They're this really important anchor tenant that investors look to to know that you've got secured billing. But what that does is it lowers the barrier to entry for smaller companies, for Australian companies, for our banks, for our research institutions, for our startups. And if those facilities aren't built here, it's gonna take a hell of a lot of them to raise the capital and the billing to enable those facilities to be built. So it's not just about supporting AWS. It is about Australia, Australian companies, Australian capability, our startups, our research institutions, our health research labs, but they play an important role because they enable those facilities to be built.
Matt Madden
They do.
Kathryn House
Well, I think there is so much more ground that we could have covered, but we're unfortunately out of time. Belinda, thank you so much for all your insights today.
Belinda Dennett
You're welcome. It was great to join you again and go head-to-head with Matt. It's always fun.
Kathryn House
I love a bit of debate.
Matt Madden
It's good because that's what we need is debate. Right? We need diversity of opinion. We just can't have one going the wrong way. And I think it's really important that people understand, and Belinda and I both agree on this, this is our opportunity right now.
Kathryn House
Yes. And it's a generational opportunity.
Matt Madden
Generational.
Kathryn House
So, Matt, great to have you join, and it sounds like you are set for a very busy year.
Matt Madden
Very busy year. Very.
Kathryn House
To our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to rate or review the show on your podcast platform of choice as that will help other people find us. And make sure to follow us so you don't miss any of our fortnightly episodes. Until next time.
