Data Centre Social Impact Assessments: Are They Just a Tick-Box Exercise?
More than 70% of data centres under construction in Australia are already pre-leased before the host community has been meaningfully consulted.
Australia's data centre pipeline has more than doubled to 225-plus projects in a year, requiring up to $155 billion in investment by 2035, while Sydney's projected data centre water use is set to rise 26-fold to 91 billion litres a year by the same date. NMC's analysis identifies five structural reasons social impact assessments consistently promise more than they deliver, from developer-funded assessments to a post-approval compliance vacuum, and sets out five mechanisms, including binding Community Benefit Agreements and public real-time dashboards, that close the gap. Councils that set enforceable thresholds before proposals arrive negotiate from a position of strength; those that wait negotiate on the developer's terms.
