Three communities. Three countries. Three channels that go nowhere.
Issue 009 closed with a promise. The data centre policy gap, it noted, looks one way from a government briefing. It looks different from a community meeting room. This is the view from the meeting room.
Three communities. Three countries. Three different reasons why the channel that was supposed to give them a voice produced no result. The through-line is not that communities opposed data centres — it is that each had a formal mechanism for registering that opposition, and in each case the mechanism was structurally incapable of producing accountability.
That distinction matters. These are not communities that lacked access to process. They engaged the process. The process did not work. Understanding why it did not work — specifically, which link in the accountability chain broke, and why — is more useful than the general observation that communities are unhappy with data centre growth.
In March 2026, the NSW Investment Delivery Authority endorsed fifteen data centre projects for fast-track approval. One of them was AirTrunk's proposed $5 billion campus on Mamre Road in Kemps Creek — a 52-hectare site that would, at 1.2 gigawatts, become the first data centre in Australia to surpass the 1GW mark. The facility would include 852 diesel backup generators and consume an estimated 22.4 million litres of water per year.
The community adjacent to the site is not an abstraction. Mamre Anglican School sits directly across the road. Its principal, Ross Whelan, submitted to the NSW Department of Planning that the institution had concerns about air quality and noise from construction and ongoing operations, and raised the proximity of diesel storage and power generation to the school. He noted that "knowledge and understanding of their impact on adjoining communities has not had time to be reliably informed." The Anglican Schools Corporation subsequently identified a new site and sought government assistance to relocate. The Catholic Schools Parramatta Diocese, representing two nearby schools, requested that diesel generator testing be scheduled outside school hours. The Catholic Church of the Diocese of Parramatta explicitly objected, citing risks to the adjacent Emmaus Retirement Village. Penrith City Council objected, calling the site unsuitable for a development of this scale.
During the exhibition period, the NSW EPA submitted that the Environmental Impact Statement did not provide sufficient information to complete its assessment — flagging noise, air quality, and proximity to schools and aged care.
A separate investigation into AirTrunk's existing SYD2 facility at Lane Cove found that mandatory noise verification reports — required under the facility's planning consent — had not been submitted to NSW Planning. Some are years overdue. Planning confirmed it had not received them. Operational noise has already exceeded predicted levels at nearby residential buildings. Fire and Rescue NSW confirmed it has not received required fire safety documentation for SYD2 either.
The planning objections were real. The community engaged the process correctly. The regulatory gap — no EPA licence required, no compliance follow-through on the existing facility — meant that engagement landed in a system with no enforcement at the other end.
The NSW parliamentary inquiry into data centres opened in May 2026. It is, for the moment, the only accountability mechanism with any teeth, and it is not a regulator.
Yuki Mizoi, 54, lives in a condominium in the Shiohama district of Koto Ward. In February 2025, major real estate company Hulic began constructing a data centre on an approximately 5,000-square-metre section directly beside his building — among the warehouses and condominiums that characterise the district. Mizoi told Yomiuri Shimbun that he feared the noise and heat discharge from the facility's around-the-clock operations. His condominium association wrote to Hulic multiple times.
There is no regulator to call. Under Japan's City Planning Act, data centres are generally treated as offices rather than factories. That classification — a legacy of a regulatory framework written before hyperscale AI infrastructure existed — means they can be built across a wide range of zones and sit outside the scope of factory noise obligations. There are no laws governing heat discharge from cooling systems. The cooling systems run continuously.
The Koto Ward office responded to accumulating community concern by extending its required notification period from 90 to 120 days before data centre construction applications. It also required developers to clearly mark the location of outdoor air conditioning compressor units. An official described this as having "the effect of encouraging companies to offer careful explanations." In a separate case in the ward, residents considering arbitration against developer GLP over a planned data centre found the legal framework offered limited purchase — GLP declined to comment and construction was scheduled to proceed.
On 31 March 2026, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government published guidelines for data centres "harmonised with urban development." Law firm Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu noted in an April 2026 briefing to clients that these guidelines carry no legally binding force. The Japan Data Centre Council's executive director told Kyodo: "The only suitable sites are in Tokyo, Osaka, and their suburbs. Right now, anxiety is prevailing."
Heat discharge remains entirely ungoverned. The gap between the community's experience and the law's reach is not a gap anyone designed — it is a gap no one has updated the law to close.
Mahul is a former fishing village in eastern Mumbai, now home to tens of thousands of people resettled there after slum clearances elsewhere in the city. The Bombay High Court has declared parts of it unfit for human habitation. The air is heavy with pollution from the Tata Group's Trombay coal plant and refineries and chemical factories in the surrounding industrial zone. Residents report widespread respiratory illness, cancer, and skin conditions. Santosh Jadhav, who has lobbied the government to relocate people out of Mahul, described conditions to The Guardian in November 2025 as "hell for us here."
The community's central demand was not complicated: close the coal plants. Both Tata's Trombay plant and the Adani Group's Dahanu plant were scheduled for decommissioning as part of India's emissions commitments. In late 2023, both were given extensions.
The reason cited in Tata's petition to the Maharashtra state energy board — the single biggest factor — was increased energy demand from data centres. Adani similarly stated that most anticipated new demand in the years following its plant's scheduled closure date would come from data centres. Maharashtra extended Tata's coal plant by at least five years. The state government is now planning three 500MW data centre parks in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai, with an expected investment of Rs 1.60 lakh crore.
To understand the scale of demand driving this: according to a leaked report reviewed by SourceMaterial and The Guardian, Amazon operated 16 data centres in Mumbai in 2023, consuming over 624,000 megawatt hours of electricity — equivalent to powering more than 400,000 Indian households for a year. Amazon's colocation facilities have purchased 41 diesel backup generators; one site across Thane Creek from Mahul hosts 14 of them. In February 2026, the Indian government announced a 20-year tax holiday for foreign cloud companies using Indian data centres, positioning the country as a global hub for AI infrastructure.
The extension was granted because of data centre demand. The petition became evidence of the need it sought to end.
In the Union Budget 2026–27, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the tax holiday. There was no equivalent announcement for Mahul.
Three different breaks. Three different regulatory gaps. But the same structural outcome: communities with formal channels, engaging those channels correctly, arriving at a process that is incapable of producing accountability.
In Kemps Creek the gap is a licensing exemption — the EPA has no authority over the facility. In Koto Ward it is a classification anachronism — offices are not factories, so factory law does not apply. In Mahul it is a demand inversion — the community's case became the argument against itself.
What they share is speed. The NSW Investment Delivery Authority fast-tracked fifteen projects in a single month. Tokyo's Metropolitan Government published guidelines that acknowledge community concern and carry no legal weight. The Maharashtra government granted coal plant extensions because data centre demand was rising too fast to wait. AirTrunk's SYD2 compliance reports are years overdue; the parliamentary inquiry that might examine this opened this month.
Investment moves at the speed governments decide to move it. Accountability moves at the speed the regulatory framework allows. In all three markets, that framework was not designed for the infrastructure it is now asked to govern.
The communities are not asking for data centres to stop. Whelan's submission at Kemps Creek explicitly acknowledged the growing demand for data centre infrastructure. The Koto Ward office framed its guidelines as supporting both development and community trust. What they are asking for is a channel that connects to an exit — a process that is capable of producing an outcome other than the one already decided.
That channel does not currently exist in any of these three markets. Building it is the work Issue 009 described as needing to happen in the next eighteen months. These are three illustrations of what it costs when it doesn't.
Next: The Brussels Effect is coming regardless. The question is whether APAC governments shape it or inherit it. Arc Brief looks at which markets are closest to negotiating from a position of choice — and what that window looks like from here.
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