AEMO Flags AI’s Sevenfold Power Surge

AI is becoming critical infrastructure before organizations have built the operational and security controls to manage it.

• –Data centres could consume 13% of Australia’s grid power by 2036, making energy availability a developer and cloud-planning constraint.
• –More than 40% of proposed projects have already dropped out or regressed, underscoring how speculative AI infrastructure forecasts remain.
• –Developers will increasingly need to factor location, grid stability, water usage, renewable-power contracts, and latency into deployment decisions.
• –LayerX reports that the top 5% of enterprise AI users access six or more tools, creating a long-tail shadow-AI problem that security teams struggle to inventory.
• –The common lesson is governance: AI workloads need both physical capacity planning and identity, access, and data-flow controls.