Published on the 13/08/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Scott Farquhar’s ‘bold and novel’ vision…

“We should be exporting megawatts as megabytes and in return getting paid megabucks,” says Scott Farquhar.

The Atlassian co-founder and now chair of the Tech Council of Australia, outlined his vision of Australia as a data centre host for the entire South East Asian region and potentially beyond, including the ‘bold and novel’ suggestion of providing ‘digital embassies’ in what he says is a multi-billion dollar opportunity for the country.

“Fixing this one thing could unlock billions of foreign investment.”

“We should be powering the entire region,” Farquhar says.

Speaking at the National Press Club, the billionaire called for government support to help fast-track his data centre vision for the country with an urgent amendment of the copyright law, and new training schemes.

Farquhar says Australia has clear advantages when it comes to becoming a data centre hub for the region, including attractively priced green power, being cost competitive at building data centres, supportive laws and talent density.

But there are areas holding the country back. First among those is copyright laws which Farquhar says are out of sync with the rest of the world and lack the exemptions seen in the US and Europe for fair use for text and data mining. That’s making large language model provides reluctant to train their models in Australia, he says.

The 2014 Australian Law Reform Commission and the 2016 Australian Productivity Commission both recommended changes, he says.

Earlier this month, the Productivity Commission’s interim report into harnessing data and digital technology called for the introduction of a text and data mining exemption from copyright infringement which would permit tech companies to use copyrighted work to train their AI models. It’s a proposal that has been slated by the arts sector, with the Arts Law Centre saying artists rights are compromised in the report findings. It says big tech already benefits through all sorts of economic and policy levers that mean, as a sector, its profits margins have increased at a rate ‘almost as swift as the technological developments that have brought the world generative AI.”

Farquhar, however, says the Australian laws are a ‘perverse situation’ where copyright holders don’t see a single dollar more as a result of the laws, but Australia misses out on the economic upside of companies hosting and training models in Australia.

He says some local companies are also looking at moving some of their training overseas, out of fear that if they train models in Australia they could be at risk of copyright lawsuits.

“My first ask of the Australian government is for the attorney-general to urgently amend the Copyright Act to look at fair use and text and data mining exceptions. Fixing this one thing could unlock billions of foreign investment in Australia.”

Talent of course, is another barrier, and here Farquhar is calling for support and partnership with Unions to create a tech trades digital apprenticeships which would provide six to 12 months training to get people ready for high-demand industries like data centre construction and battery installation.

Currently many of the apprenticeships take four years. Farquhar argues that for his data centre vision only a subset of the full qualification is required and the tech apprenticeships could be stepping stones to full trades such as electricians or plumbers, but more rapidly provide the workforce required needed to build data centres.

And the final barrier? Sovereignty. And that’s where Farquhar’s master plan of digital embassies comes into play.

“Just like we host embassies from around the world on Australian soil, Australia should host digital embassies – secure, sovereign cloud vaults that host countries’ most important data operating under the laws of that country,” he says.

“Why host your foreign data in any other country, when you could host it in AU with cheaper power, faster build times, under the laws of your own country? We could be the provider of choice for every government in the region and every business that needs a SEA data centre.”

Given that the countries would be hosting in Australia under their own laws, there would be no need for copyright changes for them, but Farquhar says not all countries and companies would want a digital embassy, hence the need for copyright changes.

Apps the real economic transformation

While data centres are a ‘nation building’ opportunity and infrastructure is critical, Farquhar says the real economic transformation happens at the application level.

Research by the Tech Council shows if Australian businesses adopted existing AI tools it could add up to $115 billion annually to Australia’s economy by 2030.

He urged business leaders to use AI ‘every single day’ so they understand what is coming and can be a ‘leader for the future’ and redesign their internal processes, particularly in areas like customer service, sales and admin.

Reimaging their core business offering – the problems the business solves and how AI will enable you to solve them better, was his third call out for businesses.

Farquhar called on politicians, government and bureaucrats to take the same three steps, saying the needed to be using AI themselves to understand what is possible; and redesign back end systems and how they interact with customers through providing more APIs, which he dubbed the building blocks to using AI at scale.

“As businesses increasingly move at AI pace, governments are going to increasingly become the bottleneck. I’m calling on all levels of governments to make their services available via API. Interacting with courts, renewing a license, applying for a passport, claiming a child care subsidy should all be possible electronically and embedded in third party applications. And these shouldn’t be seven year consulting projects. Modern tools mean we can complete these in weeks and months, not years.”

Going even further he said digital agents should be created for every interaction with government, noting the slowness of many government processes including housing approvals.

His vision: Housing agents trained on every application ever filed and all the changes people made along the way, and then working with council officers to ensure approvals or rejections happened within a week of development applications being filed.

“And what if the agent was made available to the public. Not to approve, but… you could send in your application and within minutes get a percentage chance of success.

“We could dramatically increase the number of buildings built without changing a single law,” he says.

“Just as we have got used to using energy to power physical work, we have to get used to and comfortable with using energy to power knowledge work.”