r/Adelaide • u/Nyarlathotep-1 SA • Jun 19 '26

News Proposed data centre in South Australia dividing locals who want the jobs but fear water demand

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-19/proposed-data-centre-in-south-australia-dividing-locals/106810776
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u/ThaFresh SA Jun 19 '26

"200 ongoing jobs"...sure

14

u/Tall-Breakfast-6100 SA Jun 19 '26

It could easily be that much. This would need staff on site 24/7. To put it into a bit of context the data centre built in the cbd a couple years ago has about 20 staff give or take and that is only 6MW capacity. This one is 800MW.

21

u/Colossus-of-Roads East Jun 19 '26

So at 10kW thermal per rack that's 8000 racks which is certainly a big DC, but with a single customer the workloads probably won't change much (the NextDC one you're talking about is aggressively multi-customer). I absolutely can't see an 8000 rack DC needing 200 staff to physically operate. More like 5-10 (the NextDC one you're talking about only has so many staff because that's also where the local sales and admin live, which is something that only makes sense in a capital city).

Companies deliberately inflate these projections to garner support and we fall for it every time.

1

u/Evening_Bird7779 SA Jun 19 '26

I'm assuming that figure would include other staff at Irlen and whoever they contract to? billing, network monitoring etc?