Adopting artificial intelligence and strengthening Australia's local AI industry could boost the nation's GDP by up to $142 billion annually by 2030, according to a new report funded by American AI firm and ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The report, prepared by consultant Shahar Merom, was developed in collaboration with a steering committee of industry bodies — including ACS (Australian Computer Society), the publisher of Information Age.

The economic analysis, titled Australia’s AI Opportunities, found AI was already contributing $21 billion to Australia’s annual GDP, but increasing use of the technology could improve the nation’s productivity and increase GDP by $112 billion annually.

Building “a sovereign AI industry” in Australia could add a further $18 billion a year, while establishing the nation “as an exporter of AI-enabled products, education, and computational capacity” could generate $11 billion per annum, the report forecast.

ACS CEO Josh Griggs said the report highlighted AI was “not just an economic lever”, but also “a critical technology for Australia’s future”.

“To capture the opportunity, we must build world-class compute infrastructure and accelerate the development of advanced digital skills,” he said.

“ACS is focused on ensuring our engineers, developers, and data scientists are equipped to design, deploy, and govern AI systems that are innovative, resilient, and trusted."

Other groups on the report’s steering committee include the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA), the Australian Information Industry Association (AiiA), the Data Centre Alliance (DCA), and Women in Digital (WiD).

It also included local data centre firms AirTrunk, NextDC, and CDC.

Building local LLMs ‘almost the distraction’, OpenAI says

OpenAI’s head of communications in the Asia Pacific, Jake Wilczynski, told the 2025 AI Leadership Summit in Brisbane on Tuesday that he believed countries were moving away from the idea of needing their own large language models (LLMs) and were focusing more on infrastructure.

“We obviously welcome local companies and local investments that are happening at the government level to build local LLMs,” he said.

“But I think often what gets missed is if that becomes the primary focus and almost the distraction of the conversation, it misses the opportunity in all of the other areas.”

Wilczynski argued OpenAI’s new report showed deploying existing AI models would improve Australia’s productivity, and suggested OpenAI could help increase local AI demand to spur on the creation of more AI infrastructure.


OpenAI's Jake Wilczynski (left) speaks during a panel discussion at the 2025 AI Leadership Summit in Brisbane. Image: CEDA / Supplied

The report argued AI adoption in Australia could increase wages, reduce the gender wage gap, and improve workforce shortages in some industries.

But it also saw Australia’s “limited compute infrastructure, skills shortages, and [low] public trust in AI systems” as barriers to those opportunities.

OpenAI recently inked its second contract with the Australian government for the use of its software, and has employed the services of local lobbyists.

The company’s latest report on Australia comes after it set out a 10-point “AI Action Plan” for the nation to “secure its AI future” in an Economic Blueprint it released in July.

OpenAI, which claims ChatGPT is now used by around 10 million Australians each week, released an AI-focused web browser on Thursday called ChatGPT Atlas and is also developing a suite of consumer AI hardware.

Australia as an AI factory

OpenAI’s push for Australia to increase its AI infrastructure comes as companies such as Firmus Technologies, Maincode, and Sovereign Australia AI build out signficant local AI projects.

Firmus Technologies has positioned itself as an AI infrastructure company which will tap renewable energy to power major data centre projects, which other firms and organisations will use for AI computing.

Last week the company extended its so-called Project Southgate to include infrastructure projects in both Tasmania and Melbourne, with first stage investments of $4.5 billion and projections of up to $73.3 billion needed for further work across more of the country through 2028.


Firmus Technologies says every stage of its Project Southgate will be powered by renewable energy. Image: Supplied

Professor Kimberlee Weatherall, co-director of the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance at the University of Sydney, told the 2025 AI Leadership Summit she would like to see Australia “be generally ambitious” beyond just AI infrastructure, through its own AI models and research.

“Some of the public discussion around those sorts of ideas was, ‘Let’s be the place where everyone sticks their data centres in the middle of the desert,’” she said.

“Which feels a little bit like, ‘Let’s be the world’s mine, or let’s be the world’s farm to grow wheat.’

“We don’t want to be just thinking at the data centre level.”

Maincode last week debuted its “Australian-made” foundation model Matilda and teased model factory infrastructure it dubbed MC-1, without sharing any hardware details.

Sovereign Australia AI announced in September that it planned to develop its own local AI models, after making an order for 256 Nvidia Blackwell B200 graphics processing units (GPUs).