At its most basic level, a data centre is a large, cooled building that houses racks of servers and other IT hardware. These ‘on-premises’ data centres are still being built – an all-of-government data centre that hosts the country’s most sensitive public data opened at Whenuapai airbase last year. The new data centres being proposed and constructed are AI data centres – to train and run proprietary AI models. Both the International Energy Agency and a United Nations research group recently published reports estimating that data centre energy use will double by 2030. There have also been complaints about noise, the consenting or permitting process, and a lack of transparency from data centre companies.