How Melbourne’s AI and Data Center Flywheel Is Accelerating Research Innovation
View original at spectrum.ieee.orgIEEE Spectrum - Technical Title: How Melbourne’s AI and Data Center Flywheel Is Accelerating Research Innovation Date: 2026-05-18 10:00 Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/melbourne-ai-data-center-innovation <img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/hot-air-balloons-over-a-riverside-city-skyline-at-sunrise-with-p…
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Melbourne's trajectory highlights what enables research at scale: access to frontier-grade compute, proximity to industry-ready infrastructure, and repeated opportunities for global research communities to convene
60% confidenceMAVERIC employs closed-loop liquid cooling to reduce water consumption compared with conventional air-cooled systems, aligning large-scale compute growth with sustainability objectives while supporting high-density, high-throughput workloads
60% confidenceMelbourne hosts Australia's largest cluster of AI firms with 188 companies, and more than 40 data centres currently operate across Victoria
60% confidenceIn February 2026, CDC Data Centres opened its first Melbourne campus in Brooklyn with two live facilities and a third in planning; combined with CDC's Laverton campus, Melbourne is projected to host more than 800 megawatts of sovereign digital capacity
60% confidenceMAVERIC is Australia's largest university-based AI supercomputer, built and deployed by Monash University in partnership with NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, and CDC Data Centres
60% confidenceMAVERIC provides a huge leap forward in compute capability that will revolutionize researchers' ability to address the most challenging and important research questions across medical research, information technology, and STEM disciplines; will seed cross-disciplinary collaborations and allow scientists to make major discoveries that positively impact the Australian and global population.
60% confidenceMelbourne was named Time Out's Best City in the World in 2026, the first Australian city to hold the title
60% confidenceMelbourne's expanding data centre footprint now supports hyperscale compute, applied AI deployment and large-scale research workloads simultaneously
60% confidenceMAVERIC enables Australian researchers to train and evaluate large models domestically while keeping highly sensitive datasets secure and under national jurisdiction, particularly relevant in medical research where privacy, regulation or IP constraints limit use of offshore cloud resources
60% confidenceMelbourne Convention Bureau is the first convention bureau in the Asia Pacific region to receive the IEEE Organisational Supporting Friend of MGA recognition
60% confidenceAustralia ranked second globally in 2024 data centre investment, behind only the United States, ahead of Japan, Singapore, UK, and Canada
60% confidenceMelbourne is Australia's fastest-growing capital, attracting increasing concentrations of engineering and technology talent, investment and international engagement
60% confidence
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