Federal government's tech investment strategy targets Sydney as Asia-Pacific AI hub

The federal government's National Artificial Intelligence Centre and Tech Investment Strategy is directing $1.2 billion into Sydney's technology ecosystem, cementing the city's position as the largest AI and technology hub in the southern hemisphere and positioning Australia to capture a greater share of the Asia-Pacific's rapidly growing technology services export market.

The investment spans three streams: $420 million for the National AI Centre's expansion of its applied research and technology transfer programs at CSIRO's Sydney facilities, $380 million for the CSIRO spin-out and university commercialisation pipeline through the National Reconstruction Fund's advanced manufacturing stream, and $400 million for the sovereign data infrastructure — the national cloud and high-performance computing resources — that government, research, and commercial users depend on.

Science and Technology Minister Ed Husic said Australia had an opportunity to be more than an adopter of AI technology and to be a creator and exporter of AI solutions, particularly in the agriculture, mining, health, and financial services sectors where Australian expertise and data were world-class. "We're not going to build ChatGPT. But we can build AI that makes Australian agriculture more productive and then sell that capability to every wheat-growing country in the world," he said.

Tech Council of Australia chief executive Kate Pounder welcomed the investment as the most coherent and substantial federal technology policy initiative since the NBN, noting that the combination of research, commercialisation, and infrastructure investment addressed the full ecosystem in a way that previous programs had not. The council is advocating for an extension of the skilled migration pathways for technology specialists to complement the financial investment.

Sydney's technology sector employment has grown to 245,000 — now exceeding financial services as the city's largest employing sector — and the federal investment is expected to add a further 50,000 positions over five years.

This article was compiled by AI from the sources linked above and screened before publishing. See our editorial standards.