The Green Party has called for a one-year pause on consenting new artificial intelligence data centres, arguing that New Zealand is letting some of the most power-hungry buildings in the country go up without any national rules to protect electricity supply, water or the communities next door.
The demand was one of the sharper lines in the party’s election manifesto, released on Sunday. Co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson framed the pause not as a ban on data storage or the internet, but as a chance to write proper rules before a wave of enormous facilities locks in decades of electricity demand. The proposal covers the largest hyperscale developments, and would run only until national standards are in place.
At the centre of the argument is a single project. Singapore-based Datagrid was granted resource consent in March to build a $3.5 billion data centre at Makarewa, just north of Invercargill. The 78,000 square metre facility would draw around 280 megawatts of power. That is roughly 6 percent of the country’s total electricity supply, enough to run more than 300,000 households, and would make it the second-largest single electricity user in New Zealand after the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter.
Swarbrick told RNZ that the current planning system does not force operators to answer basic questions before they connect. “Currently, councils get to decide through their planning rules whether to consent these developments,” she said, and many go through without public notification. Her pitch is that the country has not had the chance to decide whether it wants these buildings at all, let alone on what terms.
The concern driving the policy is that the largest overseas operators draw heavily on power and water while sending their profits offshore. The Greens want any pause used to develop mandatory renewable energy requirements, closed-loop cooling and water standards, grid protection measures, and a community consultation step to replace the quiet, non-notified consents that some projects have used. The party points to New York, which enacted a similar pause, and to parts of Australia where operators are required to help fund new renewable generation and grid upgrades.
Water has become part of the fight. The Datagrid consent allows the site to draw more than 600,000 litres of groundwater a day, which works out at around 220 million litres a year. The company has since said it will not use groundwater at all, relying instead on air cooling and captured rainwater. That gap, between what a consent permits and what a company promises, is exactly the sort of thing the Greens say should be nailed down in law rather than left to goodwill.
The project already has a foot in the local electricity industry. Mercury Energy has taken a 12.7 percent stake in the development, investing around $53 million, which ties one of the country’s big generators directly to the success of the plant it would help power.
The idea landed on the same day the Greens put out a 43-page manifesto built around taxing wealth and lifting spending on public services. “We will tax the super-rich and address corporate greed so that we can invest that back into the services that people rely on,” Davidson said. On the data centre question specifically, Swarbrick argued the least the country could do was understand the trade. “If we are going to let these things be built, we should at least understand who is benefitting and ensure we protect our natural resources and communities,” she said.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon rejected the call outright. He described the Greens as “alarmist” and said the buildings were part of the plan for a bigger economy. “Data centres are critical for us going forward to add more value into our economy, to embrace more technology,” he told reporters. The Government’s position is that the country should be attracting this kind of investment, not warning it off.
Labour landed somewhere in the middle. Leader Chris Hipkins did not back a formal pause, but he accepted the underlying worry. “There are real issues around environmental protection,” he said, adding that “the government does need to put more guidelines and more rules in place fairly urgently around that.” That leaves the two largest opposition parties agreeing on the problem while splitting on how hard to hit the brakes.
The debate matters well beyond Southland. New Zealand has spent recent winters watching wholesale power prices spike when lake levels drop and gas runs short, and households have felt it in their bills. Adding a customer the size of a small city to the grid changes the maths for everyone else, because new demand competes for the same electricity until new generation is built to match it. The counter-argument is that a firm, round-the-clock buyer like a data centre can give generators the certainty they need to build more wind and solar in the first place.
None of that is settled, and with an election campaign now under way it is unlikely to be settled quietly. Data centres sit at the meeting point of three things New Zealanders care about, cheaper power, protected water, and a bigger economy, and every party is now being asked to say which of those it would put first.
Where each party stands on energy, tax and the environment is shaping up as a defining choice this election. You can compare the parties on the issues that matter to you with our voting tool.
What do you think, should New Zealand pause new AI data centres until there are national rules, or is the investment too valuable to slow down? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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