BCSDA lodges submission on national standards for large data centres

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BCSDA has lodged its submission to the Australian Government consultation on large data-centre standards, supporting nationally consistent mandatory minimum requirements that make AI infrastructure investable while strengthening the energy, water, infrastructure and community systems on which it depends.

SYDNEY, 9 October 2026 — The Business Council for Sustainable Development Australia (BCSDA) has lodged its submission to the Australian Government’s consultation, Getting it right: Building AI infrastructure that works for Australia.

The Office of Artificial Intelligence is developing mandatory requirements for large data centres covering their contribution to Australia’s energy transition, sustainable water use, infrastructure costs, location and community impacts, and skills and training.

BCSDA’s submission focuses specifically on those large data-centre requirements. It does not seek to take a general position on the consultation’s separate questions concerning frontier AI-training safety, copyright, model governance or security.

Why BCSDA contributed

Data-centre growth is becoming much more than a digital-infrastructure issue. At sufficient scale, it becomes an energy, water, land, materials, workforce, community and investment issue.

That makes this consultation directly relevant to BCSDA’s purpose and agenda.

BCSDA works to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world by helping Australian businesses turn sustainability ambition, policy and standards into practical implementation. This issue sits across several of BCSDA’s priority areas — Climate & Energy, Circularity, People and Corporate Performance — and illustrates the kind of challenge where sustainable development and business performance need to be considered together.

For BCSDA, the policy question is therefore not whether Australia should attract AI and data-centre investment. It is how Australia can attract and enable that investment while ensuring the systems on which it relies are strengthened rather than strained.

This is also consistent with BCSDA’s member-first agenda: providing earlier decision intelligence, practical implementation insight and a credible business voice in policy design where emerging rules may materially affect investment, operations, infrastructure and supply chains.

What BCSDA is recommending

BCSDA supports nationally consistent mandatory minimum standards for large data centres, built around a principle of positive system contribution.

1. Energy and grid contribution — move beyond annual renewable matching alone toward additional renewable supply, appropriate firming, flexibility and progressively stronger temporal integrity.

2. Resource-ready place and long-term resilience — test electricity, water, telecommunications, land, climate and nature conditions before major investment and connection decisions are locked in.

3. Circular AI infrastructure — build lifecycle planning, equipment longevity, repair, reuse, recovery, recycling and adaptive reuse into this emerging infrastructure class from the start.

4. Workforce, suppliers and community capability — measure whether projects add skills, supplier capability and meaningful local benefit, rather than relying only on headline job numbers or evidence that consultation occurred.

5. Decision-useful and interoperable accountability — collect the smallest credible evidence set needed for investment, connection, compliance and public confidence, while reusing information already collected through existing Australian systems wherever possible.

BCSDA’s signature implementation recommendation is a Resource & System Readiness Plan for covered projects.

The Plan would operate as a reusable evidence passport across three stages — development and connection, pre-energisation, and operation — bringing together evidence already required through electricity, planning, water, infrastructure, workforce and community processes rather than creating another parallel approval track.

The submission also recommends clear proportionality and transition arrangements, responsibility following practical control, attributable infrastructure-cost recovery without double recovery, stronger consideration of water source and local stress, and national interoperability with state and territory systems.

The objective is an investable framework in which proponents can see requirements early enough to influence capital and contracting decisions, communities and governments can see how impacts will be managed, and compliant projects receive a more coordinated and predictable administrative pathway.

The submission was informed by feedback received through BCSDA’s Member review process. Individual organisations are not attributed.

What happens next

The Australian Government has advised that consultation feedback will be reviewed and analysed alongside targeted stakeholder engagement and ongoing work with Commonwealth, state and territory governments.

BCSDA will continue to monitor the development of the standards, any associated legislation or implementation arrangements, and the implications for Australian businesses.

As the Government’s position develops, BCSDA will assess the outcome against the recommendations in our submission and provide Members with practical intelligence on what the emerging framework means for investment, infrastructure, operations and implementation.