Australia’s $150 billion data centre rollout will hit speed bumps that kill some projects, warns the chief of Telstra’s national fibre and subsea cable network, but will still deliver a windfall to those underpinning the artificial intelligence boom.
Steven Worrall, the former Microsoft Australia boss who joined Telstra 12 months ago to lead its infrastructure division, oversees its $1.8 billion investment in the Aura network, a 14,000-kilometre long fibre cable connecting Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Darwin.
There are few people better placed to comment on Australia’s role in the relentless rise of artificial intelligence firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI or data centre operators such as Firmus Technologies. Telstra, the $53 billion telco used by millions of Australians, wants to cash in on the high-capacity networks needed to connect them.
It operates sensitive government and defence networks, owns 400,000 kilometres of subsea cables – a quarter of all the world’s subsea cables – and has privileged access to AI firms’ most advanced models, Worrall said. He would not say which ones, but it would probably include Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model.
“As we go into 2027, there will be a sifting out of what I’ll call high-quality assets and projects that have the social permission and have all the relevant support for them to go ahead,” Worrall said in an interview.