Ian Langford: Perth perfectly placed to seize digital opportunities of the future

Forget Sydney. The real front door to Australia’s digital future is Perth. Closer to Singapore than the eastern seaboard, WA is ideally placed to anchor the nation’s most important new industry: data.

Almost all of Australia’s international digital traffic — 99 per cent — runs through undersea cables. Most of it is routed east, through the Coral and Tasman seas. That leaves us dangerously exposed. Diverse routes landing in WA would not only improve speed but also provide the nation with resilience against sabotage or natural disasters. Perth could become the secure digital gateway between Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the rest of Australia.

And where the cables land, data centres follow. These vast, windowless fortresses store and process the information that drives everything from banking to artificial intelligence. They are as critical as ports or airports. WA has the land, the stability and, most importantly, the energy to host them.

Our resources industry already builds gigawatt-scale power systems in remote deserts. The same mix of renewables, gas, storage and microgrids can power digital campuses with the low-carbon reliability global tech giants demand.

The workforce is here too. The electricians, engineers and controllers who keep autonomous trucks and mining plants running in the Pilbara can be retrained to manage servers and cooling systems. WA doesn’t need to invent a new workforce; it just needs to redirect one.

But risks are real. Data centres devour electricity and water. They need secure fibre connections across the Nullarbor. They are magnets for hackers and physical sabotage. Concentrating too much of our digital lifeblood in one place could create dangerous single points of failure.

That’s why WA needs a plan. Subsea cables and data centres must be treated as critical infrastructure, like ports or rail. That means secure landing zones, diverse fibre corridors, resilience standards and streamlined approvals that give investors certainty while protecting communities. It means ensuring an Australian-controlled operator in every central campus. And it means building a workforce pipeline that bridges mining and digital skills, while opening real opportunities for Indigenous participation.

This is more than business; it’s national security. Perth campuses should be designed to host sensitive government and defence data, with vetted personnel and secure supply chains. Sovereignty must be built in from the start, not added later.

WA has never been afraid of scale. We’ve delivered mega-projects in the harshest environments on earth. If we bring that same discipline to digital infrastructure, Australia gains a faster, safer and more resilient gateway to the world. The question is whether we seize the moment or let it pass.

There’s also an economic story. The global race to build data centres is driving demand for the very minerals WA is famous for. Copper is critical to every part of digital infrastructure. Global demand is set to rise sharply through 2040, just as Australian miners ramp up production.

Clean energy is just as vital. Data centres already use about 5 per cent of Australia’s electricity, a figure expected to double by 2030. Tech giants are locking in renewables to meet this demand. Google recently signed a $3 billion hydropower deal in the US to power its campuses. Similar opportunities exist here if we connect renewable projects to the grid and unlock WA’s reserves of lithium, nickel and rare earths.

This is the virtuous cycle WA can deliver: cables bring the data, miners supply the copper and power, tech giants bring the investment. Geography gives us the edge, industry provides the capability, and global demand is knocking loudly.

Perth has always been where the desert meets the sea. With vision, it can now be where Australia’s digital future begins.

Brigadier Ian Langford (Retd) is a former Army director general and a professor at the University of NSW