October 28, 2026 — 7:50pm

Along a battered road in Melbourne’s west, turnouts are carved into dirt between hundreds of hectares of open fields and empty paddocks.

Victoria University rises out of the landscape. The institution is behind the state’s first data centre academy, which offers courses for those who want to work in the burgeoning sector.

The centres dwarf local neighbourhoods , and their annoying humming and hungry demands for the state’s power and water make them plenty of enemies. But some locals are asking a radical question: what if data centres worked for us? Instead of banning them, what if they provided their neighbours with the fastest internet speeds in Australia?

West of Melbourne Economic Development Alliance board member Kelvyn Lavelle at East Werribee.…