‘Stop the slop’: Meet the young people fighting western Sydney’s data centre rush

Résumé détaillé

Dozens of data centres are proposed for residential areas. A group of twenty-somethings are harnessing social media in an attempt to get them scrapped.

As the battle against data centres in NSW rages on, a new contender has emerged to take on the major industrial developers: an emerging group mostly of twenty-somethings from western Sydney.

Stop the Slop, made up of a core group of eight people, has been rallying residents to oppose the developments planned for Sydney’s west, which is fast becoming a data centre hub.

Dozens of data centres are operating in or proposed for suburbs stretching from Marsden Park to Kemps Creek. Christie Duong, who started the group, said the data centre resistance in the US inspired her to learn more about the developments proposed in her own community.

She discovered the scale of the data centres planned for western Sydney, connected with other young people from across the region, and they began campaigning against these projects on social media.

The response was positive: their posts gained the attention of a younger audience, and many were excited there was finally movement in Sydney’s west against the projects.

“The reason why we’re focusing on western Sydney in particular is the fact that it’s perceived to be a data centre hub with a few data centres already existing there, and how they will continue to pop up,” she said.

“We want to knock out all of [the data centres] because they’re just shady in general.”

The group has been advocating against the $7 billion plan for a data centre development in Kemps Creek, located near three schools. If approved, it would see US technology company AirTrunk develop data hall buildings across 52 hectares of vacant land.

The facility would have a power capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, which is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about one million Australian homes. In a video posted on Instagram, Duong explains the scale of the project would be the equivalent of 52 football fields. One comment asks: “wtf why have we got this epidemic of data centres?”

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