Microsoft $25b Aussie spend; fuel supplies jump; Trump, FIFA and Iran v Italy
News in brief
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday said Australia now has 46 days’ worth of petrol supplies – 10 days more than when the war in Iran began. Australia has increased the proportion of fuel it imports from the US, Argentina and Algeria.
Woodside held its AGM under new chief executive Liz Westcott and it was a rowdy affair, disrupted by protesters, with one storming the stage, as the energy giant urged the Albanese government to abandon consideration of a gas tax.
Australia has one of the fastest growing cohorts of wealthy people in the world, ranking fourth for billionaire growth while the number of ultra-high net worth individuals, worth more than $42 million, is set to expand by 60 per cent over the next five years. That is according to Knight Frank’s The Wealth Report 2026.
The Financial Times is reporting that a top envoy to President Donald Trump has asked FIFA to replace Iran with Italy in the upcoming football World Cup in the US.
An AI-powered robot has beaten expert table tennis players in a landmark machine-over-human triumph in a major competitive sport.
Fear-o-meter
Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, NextDC – all have committed to investing heavily in data centres across the country.
Data centres are measured in energy, not land, and currently Australia has 1.5 megawatts worth of data centres and that needs to double in the next few years.
Under the Albanese framework for data centre investment, the big tech and property companies need to find solutions for energy and water challenges. They can’t just rely on what’s currently available.
The bigger challenge is the poles and wires and battery storage that carries the energy from where the sun shines and the wind blows, to where it’s needed to run industry.
That’s a role for government, and so far, the Albanese parliament has not done anywhere near enough.
Fear & Greed Q+A today
On training 3 million Australians to use AI, and the impact the technology can have on organisations beyond business:
"Brisbane Catholic is... probably one of the leading frontier school systems in the world in terms of the deployment of this technology.
They deployed Copilot across all of their teachers, and I fell out of my chair when I saw the initial pilot results — they were saving nine hours a week per teacher.
Now, as they’ve scaled that across all staff, that’s come down a little bit — they’re seeing about three to four hours per week — but they’re deploying agents on top of that, learning agents, curriculum agents, assessment agents, and getting to a world where they’re saving 10 hours a week for teachers.
That’s about 20% of their time. And when you think about burnout in teaching, giving that time back so teachers can focus on students — that’s why we do this work."
Fear & Greed is a media partner of the Microsoft AI Tour
Australia’s reputation as a global data centre hub has been boosted by Microsoft’s decision to invest $25 billion over the next three years in data centres in this country.
It is the biggest-ever investment by a global technology company in Australia and follows last week’s announcement by ASX listed NextDC to raise billions of dollars to boost its portfolio of data centres, and a promise by Amazon Web Services to spend $20 billion locally.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, in Sydney yesterday, also announced that Microsoft will train 3 million Australians with workforce-ready AI skills by 2028.
The company has signed a memorandum of understanding supporting the Albanese government’s framework on data centres and AI makers, including the expectation that new projects add electricity supply to cover all or part of their usage.
Under the memorandum, Microsoft must also use water sustainably, invest in local jobs and prove they were working in Australia’s national interest.
Greed-o-meter
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