Compared to countries like South Korea, Japan, the US and EU members, Australia hasn’t committed federal funding to sovereign AI infrastructure such as national compute facilities or dedicated AI data centres.
Director for the UNSW AI Institute and founder of Robotics Australia Group, Dr Sue Keay warns that Australia’s “relentless determination” not to invest in sovereign AI infrastructure is clearly a strategic risk that will undermine national security, economic prosperity and create challenges for our society as we lose the ability to control the content we consume.
Dr Keay is one of Australia’s most influential leaders in AI and robotics. She led the development of Australia’s robotics roadmaps, highlighting how advances in robotics impact on every sector of the Australian economy, which has inspired Australia’s National Robotics Strategy.
“If we rely solely on foreign technology providers, whose IP, profits and loyalties lie outside Australia, we will lose control over critical data and infrastructure and risk having our national agenda shaped by outside interests,” she told W.Media. “We can not assume in the current geopolitical context that these technology providers will act in our national interest, as has been evident by the economic threats made against Australia in trying to enact laws to protect news content and regulate social media for our young people.”
She adds: “The fact that we are being met with the threat of economic sanctions when we want to make our own laws consistent with our societal values is a direct threat to our entire sovereignty and should highlight why we so desperately need public investment to support our efforts in the development and applications of this transformative technology.”
Look at Taiwan
Dr Keay says it is not too late, nor is Australia too small, to take decisive action now, adding that we can learn from Taiwan’s approach. “Taiwan are making AI the second pillar of their economy and have articulated their vision in a ‘Grand Strategy for a Small Country’, she says. “They are investing more than AUD 10 billion to develop the industry including significant investments in AI infrastructure (including talent).”
“Australia needs to be looking to do the same,” she says. “We would be alone among developed nations in thinking that we can enter the AI era with zero public investment required.”
States shouldn’t lead federal vision
The NSW government recently announced a new investment delivery authority aimed at critical technology and infrastructure, including data centres. The Tasmanian government just backed Firmus Technologies’ plans to create an AI factory zone in the state’s north. But federally, government intervention in AI infrastructure is non-existent.
“If you don’t know where you are going, then any road will take you there,” says Dr Keay. “While the NSW government announcement is commendable, we should not rely on our state governments to show leadership on issues of such national importance. Leadership needs to come from the top. Australia is still floundering without a vision for AI.”
“What is our AI future going to look like and how can we make sure it is one that benefits all Australians?” she questions. “Once we are clear on that vision then initiatives at state and local government level, from industry and academia can all be aligned to help achieve it. At the moment we risk individual efforts being fragmented and less efficient.”
Dr Keay believes that Australia has the potential to not just cope with the disruption caused by AI but to actively shape its future. She stresses the need for “ambition in this space,” arguing that the country shouldn’t settle for merely keeping pace but should aim to “win the races in the areas that we are good at.” She highlights Australia’s strengths, including “great talent”, “unique and valuable datasets” and the optimism of individuals launching AI start-ups.
According to Dr Keay, this energy must be “harnessed” and aligned to drive national progress. She also underscores the pivotal role of the federal government, noting its “unique capability to coordinate significant capital investments” in critical infrastructure such as AI computing facilities, sustainable energy systems, and nationwide datasets. These investments, she says, would form the “backbone necessary for innovation” and support SMEs, start-ups, and researchers. A “coordinated federal strategy” is, in her view, essential for Australia to fulfil its potential and become a “globally competitive AI nation.”
We can’t regulate what we don’t control
Australia’s focus so far has been largely on AI regulation and ethical frameworks, not infrastructure investment. Dr Keay emphasises Australia is currently an outlier amongst developed nations in its determination not to invest in infrastructure, and by that she means both physical infrastructure and the human infrastructure required to support and make use of it.
“While Australia’s leadership in ethical frameworks and AI regulation is commendable and necessary, if we are not building our own AI systems and models, on our own AI infrastructure, then we are trying to regulate things over which we have no control,” she explains.
Dr Keay stresses the need for “bold investment” in infrastructure is urgent. “It will allow us to develop sovereign AI systems and to develop and gain value from critical public datasets that align with Australia’s national values and priorities,” she says.
Building sovereign AI capability
She argues a truly sovereign AI capability would include compute resources, datasets and secured AI workloads. “Sovereign AI capability must be considered critical infrastructure,” she says. “AI is increasingly foundational to sectors like healthcare, banking, transportation and defence. Losing control over this technology would represent an unacceptable risk to Australia’s economic security and national sovereignty.”
Dr Keay believes Australian-owned AI infrastructure companies, including data centres, can ensure robust security and operational resilience, offer scalable infrastructure aligned to national standards and can collaborate closely with government and academia to ensure Australia’s AI capabilities remain sovereign, secure and globally competitive.
“While its tempting to think that private industry will foot the bill for our national AI transformation, at some point the public will pay,” she says. “Australia’s supercomputing capability has always relied on public investment and is vital to the research community.”
“There is no commercial imperative to supply such services at an affordable price, so even if we dodge paying for infrastructure we will still have to pay to access it,” she says. “People seem to forget that access to AI infrastructure can be sold anywhere in the world so we could have foreign-owned data centres on Australian land, consuming Australian power and water, that are not running any workloads for Australians and generating no meaningful income for Australia.”
Dr Keay argues that while ResetData and Nvidia recent investment announcement in AI factories is “vital and welcome”, the scale and scope of infrastructure required – that is accessible to Australian researchers, SMEs and the wider business community – requires significant government backing. “Ideally the investment should be in the form of public-private partnerships aligned to a clear national AI infrastructure strategy,” she said. “Without this, private investments risk becoming fragmented, commercially driven initiatives rather than components of a cohesive, sovereign AI ecosystem.”
International lessons for Australia
Looking at countries like South Korea or EU projects like Gaia-X and EuroHPC, it is clear how much of an outlier Australia has become in comparison to other international AI infrastructure initiatives. South Korea, for example, has dedicated significant government funding (part of a broader KRW 9.4 trillion AI semiconductor initiative through 2027, with specific national AI computing centre investments of KRW 2-2.5 trillion) to rapidly deploy thousands of GPUs, aiming to establish both a national AI compute centre and an advanced supercomputing backbone.
Japan has upgraded its public AI supercomputing with ABCI 3.0, which became fully operational in January 2025 and features NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs, enhancing domestic GPU-powered resources through government-funded infrastructure.
“There are a lot of things we can learn,” says Dr Keay. “These programs illustrate the power of targeted, large-scale public investment combining infrastructure, research excellence, workforce development, and industry development to build national capability. In the case of South Korea, it also shows the value inherent when a nation not only develops a vision for the future but then executes it, with South Korea deriving measurable benefit.”
She warns that Australia has a unique opportunity but we are at risk of squandering without even realising it. “Why is Australia an attractive destination for foreign capital investment in AI infrastructure?”, she says. “It is because we have a competitive advantage in the supply of‘sustainable compute; that is computing resources that anyone in the world can purchase with a low carbon footprint.”
“By leveraging our unique strengths – high-quality sovereign datasets, renewable energy resources, a highly educated workforce, strategic connectivity via undersea cable to all major markets, geopolitical stability, democratic governance, and commitment to human rights – we can establish scalable, sustainable, and competitive AI capabilities that not only serve Australian interests but that we can export to the world,” she adds.
Dr Keay emphasised Australia should also be thinking about next generation and the sort of jobs they can expect in the future and the sort of jobs that they will want in the future. “Embracing and investing in Australia’s AI opportunity will create abundant and attractive jobs in technology to which many young people will aspire. What other industries of the future are we creating that offer the same promise?”, she says. “Where is our ambition? What is our vision for the future? The opportunity is there, we just need the will to act.”
Dr Keay
Dr Sue Keay is an expert in robotics, AI and automation. She is the Director for UNSW AI Institute and Founder of Robotics Australia Group, the peak body for Australia’s robotics industry. An advocate for diversity in technology, she represents Oceania for Women in Robotics and brought the Grace Hopper celebration to Australia in 2019. Dr Keay is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), a member of the Kingston AI Group and Chief Executive, Women, and she sits on a number of advisory boards, as well as being on the board of computer vision start-up, Visionary Machines. She has an MBA from The UQ Business School, a PhD in Earth Sciences from ANU and is a graduate of the Australian Institute for Company Directors.
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[Author: Simon Dux]
