“It was really ill-considered,” said Claire Spry, president of the North Katoomba Public School Parents and Citizens’ association, of a plan to put a data centre on a residential street in the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba. The application has now been withdrawn.
The developer, engineering firm MAK Urban Group, had lodged a development application last month for a one to two megawatt industrial data centre worth $4.8 million. The block sits next to a local park and about 400m from the school. It currently houses community disability support services. Katoomba has about 8000 residents and lies roughly two hours west of Sydney, ringed by more than 260,000ha of World Heritage-listed national park.
“I don’t think that the people realised just how close it was to the school, as well as the park and dog park, not to mention the hospital,” Spry said. The site backs on to Yosemite Creek, which feeds Minnehaha Falls. “All the kids play there.”
How residents fought back
Jackie Manners, organiser of the No Data Centres in Katoomba campaign, found out about the plan in her local paper and realised it was a block from her home. She said she was “shocked and anxious.” A post in a local Facebook group “blew up,” so she set up a page for worried residents.
She and her partner Brendan then went door-knocking and handed out flyers, after learning that some people living directly across from the site knew nothing about the application. Some who had received a letter were confused by it. “There were a lot of worried people and some said they’d have to move away, they couldn’t live with that … the never-ending noise,” Manners said.
Hundreds joined the campaign page and almost 1000 signatures went onto petitions to council. The Greens also campaigned on the issue, and the P and C voted unanimously to back the opposition.
Developer and council respond
MAK general manager Mohammad Hammoud said the company remains confident that data centre infrastructure can bring economic, employment and digital connectivity benefits to regional communities. “Rather than continue with the current application, we have chosen to step back and undertake further consideration of the proposal,” he said.
The Blue Mountains City Council said it welcomed the withdrawal. Mayor Mark Greenhill called it a sensible outcome. “This was the wrong proposal in the wrong location,” he said, citing demands on power and water and questions about noise, air quality, fire risk and environmental impact.
A NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into data centres, the first of its kind in Australia, is under way, and its recommendations are not out yet. “Until those issues are properly understood and addressed, a cautious approach is needed,” Greenhill said.
Nothing confirms the application will not return. Locals plan to push for the Blue Mountains to be exempt from future data centre builds, and the campaign’s next step is to meet Planning Minister Paul Scully to argue for exemption from the statewide approval pathway.
Pressure elsewhere in Australia
Plans for a “gigawatt-scale” campus have been floated for the former Wallerawang Power Station site near Lithgow. A hyperscale campus covering about 90ha of data halls has been proposed in the Northern Territory. In May, developers withdrew plans for a 15,000sqm data centre near Perth after objections over its closeness to schools and homes and its impact on culturally significant sites. Change.org says more than 60,000 people across Australia and New Zealand have signed separate petitions against data centre and AI infrastructure proposals.
New South Wales, meanwhile, announced in March that it had conditionally endorsed $51.9 billion across 15 major data centre projects, and 90 are already running in the state.
“This was one small data centre application in one town,” the campaign said. “But the people who opposed it were looking at something bigger: What kind of place the Blue Mountains is, and who gets to decide what gets built here. Today, the answer is: the community does.”
