AI Data Centres: Exploring the Buildings Behind the AI Boom

Belinda Dennett is a highly respected public policy specialist with more than 20 years experience at the forefront of Australia’s digital economy and technology ecosystem. She is Chief Executive Officer of Data Centres Australia, the peak body for data centres and the AI infrastructure sector in Australia. Belinda was previously Head of Government Relations at AirTrunk and earlier spent more than a decade leading Microsoft’s Australian Corporate Affairs and Policy team. Belinda is a former Federal ministerial advisor with a focus on digital economy policy. She has qualifications in law and business.

Priya is a building scientist and the Director of the Post Carbon Research Centre and Associate Dean, Research and Innovation at School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University. Priya’s research interests span from sustainable building design, energy benchmarking and labelling, urban heat island, indoor air quality, to citizen science in urban microclimate monitoring, mitigation and adaptation. She has coordinated several projects in building performance for various climate zones and has published more than 130 scientific papers. She is a Fellow of the Architectural Science Association and Editor of the journal of Energy and Buildings.

Distinguished Professor Lisa M. Given (FASSA, FASIS&T) is Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, Director, Centre for Human-AI Information Environments, and Professor of Information Sciences, RMIT University (Melbourne). Her interdisciplinary research in human information behaviour brings a critical, social research lens to studies of technology use and user-focused design, including people’s experiences of artificial intelligence. Her studies embed social change, focusing on diverse settings and populations, including in healthcare, workplaces, schools, and everyday life. A Fellow, and former President, of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Prof Given is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, a member of the International Panel on the Information Environment’s Science and Methodology Committee, and lead author of Looking for Information: Examining Research on How People Engage with Information (2023). You can follow her on BlueSky @lisagiven and read about her work at https://lisagiven.com/

Professor Gary Rosengarten is Director of the Sustainable Technologies and Systems Enabling Impact Platform at RMIT University, and leader of the Laboratory for Innovative Fluid Thermal Systems in Engineering. Before pursuing an academic career, he spent three years at Australia’s national research agency, CSIRO, and two years as an engineering consultant in sustainable building design. He completed a double honours degree in Physics and Mechanical Engineering at Monash University and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of New South Wales. He applies his research expertise in energy systems to help solve a wide variety of problems, particularly in energy storage, thermal control, ultra-high flux cooling, and energy efficiency, working closely with interdisciplinary teams from academia, industry, and government. He holds 6 patents including one on thermal energy storage technology for grid stabilisation. He currently leads RMIT’s Data Centre interdisciplinary research program, working with data centre operators and adjacent industries to deliver evidence-based research that enables successful, sustainable project deployment. He is a Fellow of the Asian Union of Thermal Science and Engineering and a non-executive board member of the Australian Alliance for Energy Productivity (A2EP)