Under a cloud: the growing resentment against the massive datacentres sprouting across Australian cities

Melbourne resident Sean Brown with his son walking past the NextDC datacentre – ‘Australia’s largest hyperscale AI factory’ – in West Footscray. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

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.