Assumptions that major data centres must be in capital cities are about to be upturned, with service delivery firm DQA and indigenous tech firm Dickerson Digital poised to announce the first of what will be 22 new sovereign data centres designed along First Nations principles.
The purchase of the facility – already operating in an as-yet-unannounced regional city –signals the commencement of what founder and CEO Michael Dickerson said will be a five-to-seven-year program to build an indigenous-owned, sovereign data centre capability that also includes two sites in New Zealand and one in Tonga.
“Sovereign data is hugely important to both indigenous populations and Australian citizens as a whole,” he told Information Age, citing the challenges of new regulations such as the US CLOUD Act.
“Cultural data is hugely important,” Dickerson said.
“If the US deems that data is sensitive to US needs, it can actually own all of the data sets – and if you’ve got that in a public cloud, you can lose your whole cultural heritage.”
Concerns about loss of control over indigenous heritage-related data – explored in a recent Lowitja Institute discussion paper – have better access to indigenous data a key part of the Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan, with efforts underway to promote “in-depth data stocktakes and a far greater flow of data from governments to Indigenous organisations and communities.”
Data sovereignty has become increasingly important as local governments, businesses, and government space and other agencies face pressure to keep citizen, customer, and mapping, sensor and other operational data within Australia’s legal jurisdiction.
Rather than trying to emulate the ‘hyperscale’ cloud operations of Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and domestic players like Macquarie Government, Dickerson’s network of cloud sites will focus on maintaining local data controls while tapping DQA’s Microsoft specialist skills to incorporate locally-limited Azure technology.
Customers will be able to link into public cloud platforms for data that does not require sovereign control, while Dickerson is also using Microsoft’s Azure Orbital ‘ground stations as a service’ framework to bring satellite services to even the most remote parts of Australia.
“We can actually give the features and flexibility of Azure sovereign and Azure cloud,” Dickerson explained, promising a “whole unified approach to what data sets can and can’t move or operate under sovereign guidelines.”
“With the advent of things like genAI, you’re going to need to be delivering that data closer to where people need to consume it,” he continued – adding that in the evolving data centre model, “you can use the power and capacity of public cloud for genAI and things like that – where you can anonymise data sets to still use its power – but not send that data offshore.”
Maintaining sovereignty over cloud platforms has become crucial – particularly as businesses aggregate data to train purpose-built generative AI (genAI) large language models – with Gartner recently predicting that failure to do so will “severely impact” 30 per cent of multinationals by 2025 as businesses struggle with a growing number of trans-jurisdictional regulatory obligations, tariff restrictions, import/export bans, country specific technology protocols, and local content requirements.
Multinationals have spent decades managing their business operations within economic and geopolitical risk but now, Gartner VP analyst Brian Prentice explained, “need to expand sovereign risk to include digital to avoid any potential fallout as it increasingly fragments along national and regional lines.”
Data sovereignty, the First Nations way
The new data centre strategy is about much more than just building rows and rows of servers; rather, Dickerson envisions the regional facilities as centres of gravity for indigenous employment and economic growth.
Plans include the training of indigenous workers in technology skills – an effort to change the current situation in which there are nearly no indigenous workers in IT and only a few government initiatives to change that.
The project will, for example, leverage the Kalinda tiaki Foundation to offer jobs at Microsoft and DQA – whose CEO Steve Melville said the company would be bringing young people into Level 2 and Level 3 technical support roles to help it service its base of government agencies and large managed service providers.
“The capability that’s being built here is starting from the data centre up,” Melville explained.
“It’s a group of organisations that are working together to make this happen, so that there’s a career path there for young people.”
“We are particularly keen to foster local communities so we not only create jobs, but create a culture of adding value to the community.”
Each data centre also promises employment opportunities for local service providers in adjacent industries such as cleaning, landscaping, equipment maintenance, and more.
“We consider a data centre to be a meeting place of all of these jobs, and careers, and wealth,” explained Dickerson, a Wajarri-Nunda man from Yamatji Country.
“I think that’s fundamentally what indigenous people see anyway – community first.”
Indigenous communities will be consulted on issues such as the location of data centres and sensitivity to the land around them.
Engagement with government, defence aligned industries, secure agencies and corporates has found “a lot of businesses looking at how they can engage indigenous organisations to deliver meaningful outcomes,” Dickerson said.
“This is a clear pathway that shows from engagement to capital flow, to on the ground community involvement.”
Thanks to ubiquitous remote working technology, this distributed model of computing and training also speaks to First Nations people’s ties to their home communities.
“The big thing with technology,” Dickerson explained, “is that you can actually work from anywhere.
“You don’t need to leave country – and that means you’re not taking people out of their community, but rather you’re taking jobs to the community.”
