Getting planning approval is no longer enough to guarantee a data centre project will get built.

As Australia prepares for a rapid expansion of data centre capacity, developers face another hurdle: winning and maintaining the support of the communities in which they operate.

This is commonly described as a facility's "social licence" – the ongoing acceptance of a project by the local community and broader public.

Unlike a planning approval, a social licence is not granted by a government agency and cannot simply be secured once and for all.

Community opposition can manifest through formal objections, council reports, regulatory intervention and delays to infrastructure connections.

In some cases, it can contribute to projects being rejected or abandoned.

The community support is becoming more significant as data centres consume an increasing share of Australia's electricity.

Energy forecasts estimate Australian data centres used about 5 TWh of electricity in 2025-26, almost 3 per cent of national electricity consumption.

By 2035-36, consumption could reach 34 TWh, or about 13 per cent of national use.

More than 200 data centre connection projects have been proposed, but more than 40 sper cent have been delayed or cancelled since 2025.

Proposed projects, however, do not automatically translate into operational facilities connected to the electricity grid.

There are already examples of community opposition affecting major developments.

In May 2026, a major data centre proposal in Perth was abandoned after council officers recommended rejecting it following almost 1,900 public objections.

Overseas, governments are also responding to concerns about the impact of large data centres and other major electricity users.

Ireland has introduced requirements for new large power users to provide additional renewable energy capacity, while Singapore has imposed restrictions and efficiency requirements on new data centre development.

The experiences highlight a broader issue: where governments and communities do not have confidence that data centre developments are being managed responsibly, additional regulation can follow.

In March 2026, the Australian Government published guidelines for data centre developers that identified community trust as an important consideration.

The guidelines highlight expectations around national interests, clean energy, water use, local skills development and security.

But government guidelines and regulatory approvals do not, by themselves, demonstrate that a particular facility has community support or is meeting those expectations in practice.

Measuring social licence

This raises a difficult question for the industry: how can community support actually be measured?

Research from other industries suggests that simple measures of community sentiment can be misleading.

Trust is influenced by factors including perceived fairness, transparency and the quality of communication between organisations and communities.

The absence of public protests does not necessarily mean a community supports a project, just as a highly vocal campaign does not necessarily represent the views of an entire community.

Researchers have also warned that single numerical scores can create a misleading impression of certainty unless the methodology is transparent and missing information is properly identified.

One attempt to address this challenge has been developed by the Western Australian AI Hub, which has created a Social Licence Score™ for Australian data centres through its Data Centre Register™ (dcreg.online).

The 100-point score is based on publicly available records and documentation rather than opinion surveys.

The organisation says the detailed scoring formulas are kept private to reduce the possibility of companies attempting to manipulate their results.

What public records can reveal

Public records can provide evidence about several factors that may influence a data centre's relationship with its surrounding community.

Critical indicators include whether Indigenous land rights consultation has been completed, whether a site is appropriately zoned, whether adequate controls exist for issues such as night-time noise, and whether information about workforce diversity, energy efficiency and water use has been published.

Records can also show how companies respond to community complaints and whether relevant information has been made publicly available.

The scoring system uses several rules intended to prevent gaps in the public record from being presented as established facts.

Missing information is not guessed or automatically treated as evidence of poor performance.

Projects with incomplete records are identified as preliminary, while unverified claims made by companies cannot qualify for the highest scores.

Random online comments are also excluded from the assessment.

Results are grouped into four categories: Leading, Achieving, Developing and At Risk.

The score is not intended to measure everything that could affect a data centre project.

For example, it does not estimate a facility's energy consumption, assess individual cooling technologies or determine whether a particular region has sufficient electricity grid capacity.

Those are separate issues.

A facility can therefore meet its design and efficiency objectives while still facing opposition or political difficulties because of the pressures it places on a particular community or electricity network.

What technology professionals should look for

For technology professionals involved in designing, managing or auditing data centres, the most useful starting point may be the quality of the information available about a project.

Are key decisions documented? Can claims about energy, water, employment and community engagement be independently verified? Are consultation processes transparent? And are gaps in the public record clearly acknowledged?

These questions matter because legal compliance and community acceptance are not the same thing.

Independent audits of social licence scoring systems would provide another layer of confidence, although such audits have not yet been completed for this particular system.

Until more rigorous validation is available, composite social licence scores should therefore be treated as one source of evidence rather than a definitive measure of public opinion.

For an industry preparing for a major expansion, the distinction is important: a project can have legal permission to operate without having earned lasting community trust.

Authors

Dr Eunice Sari is a member of the ACS AISIG Steering Committee. She is an adjunct associate professor at UNSW and a globally recognised leader with 25 years of experience in humanity-centred AI and digital transformation.

Josh (Adi) Tedjasaputra, MSc, is the co-founder and director of the Western Australian AI Hub. With over 25 years of experience in Responsible AI, he specialises in human-AI trust calibration, practical AI governance, and interactive system design.

Conflict of interest statement: The authors contribute to the Western Australian AI Hub, which publishes the Data Centre Register and the Social Licence Score mentioned in this article.