Residents say AI factories with unknown environmental impacts are being rushed into development as proponents argue Australia must ride the data boom or be left behind
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When West Footscray resident Sean Brown takes his 19-month-old boy to the park, their walk passes an imposing new building cheerily spruiked as “Australia’s largest hyperscale AI factory”, a datacentre called M3.
He hates it: the construction noise from its constant expansion, the looming towers and the insistent background hum, the exhaust from the growing array of diesel generators that can help power the ranks of servers inside.