Copyright law has become the central flashpoint of Australia’s AI and data centre policy. Sharon AI chief executive James Manning says no changes are needed.
Tech heavyweights have told Australia that billions of data centre investments would be unlocked if only the country would tweak its copyright laws to allow local data to be used for AI model development.
Sharon AI co-founder and chief executive James Manning stands to benefit from mass data centre investment as much as anyone – but splits with his industry peers in saying no copyright regime change is needed.
“You only have to look at Microsoft’s commitment to spend $25 billion in this country to ask how much of a hindrance to investment is it in the market,” Manning said in an interview with Forbes Australia. “I don’t believe currently it’s a hindrance, from our perspective.”
His comments come amid reports the copyright question is looming over a potential US$15 billion local investment by AI giant Anthropic. The company is reportedly seeking 1.4GW of data centre capacity in Australia, which would effectively double existing supply. Documents released Friday under freedom of information laws reveal Anthropic CEO met with Treasury in April to seek clarity on its obligations to copyright holders under Australia’s existing laws should it decide to train its models here.
Yet as Manning points out, other tech giants have not fretted over the topic. Microsoft’s April announcement that it would spend $25 billion on data centres over the next three years came after Amazon in 2025 announced it would splash $20 billion on AI infrastructure over a four-year period.
Like Tech Council of Australia chairman Scott Farquhar, Manning says Australia has advantages in available land, energy supply and security ties with the US that nearby Asian countries can’t match. But unlike Farquhar, Manning says changes to copyright are not required to win that bounty.
“The reality is the amount of compute that we could potentially turn on in this country is greater than the compute we will domestically consume, [so] there’s a real opportunity for that to be an export economy.”
“When you compare that to, say, South Korea as a really good example, they have such a huge industrial base that whatever compute South Korea gets on in the near term they’re going to consume internally. They’re not going to have spare tokens to be able to export… that’s where we think Australia has a huge competitive advantage, and that’s why we’re focused here.”
Founded in 2024, Sharon AI is one of a spate of newly-established Australian companies seeking to capitalise on Big Tech’s insatiable need for compute. It is a neo-cloud operator whose business model is to rent space within existing data centres and, having purchased truckloads of Nvidia and AMD GPUs, sell high-performance compute to customers. That makes it different to the likes of Firmus and IREN, which are seeking to build and operate entire data centres.
Sharon AI has been energetically raising funds to meet the moment. It raised US$125 million ($180 million) when it IPO’d on the Nasdaq in February, last month announced US$1.6 billion ($2.3 billion) in new financing and plans to float on the ASX sometime this year to raise more still. All that cash is going towards securing tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs.
Yet copyright is not the only potential roadblock to an Australian data centre boom. Residents in suburbs and towns around the country are opposing the development of nearby data centres, fearing their construction will lead to booming energy prices and depletion of local water sources.
Manning believes water and energy concerns are misunderstood, but says protesting is “healthy” and that his industry’s environmental impact should be scrutinised as closely as the mining and manufacturing sectors.
It is a live issue for the industry: Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned tech companies must maintain a “social license” to expand AI capabilities, and that will be the topic of a speech given by Anthony Albanese on Wednesday. Manning says Australia could be a real beneficiary of the technology via advanced skills diffusing through society and, crucially, the tax revenue governments could collect from a booming AI sector.
“When you say to me, ‘What about our social license to operate?’ I think about what we are offering to the economy, which is not just our ability to generate a whole bunch of export revenue… We plan to pay tax in this country. NextDC will pay tax. Everyone along the value chain will pay tax in Australia, and every employee that works for us will pay tax. The multiplier effect across the economy is huge.”
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