The Shed at South Sea Islander Way.

There is a five-storey shed going up in Maroochydore that will use about as much electricity as ten and a half thousand houses. It is called SC2. It belongs to NEXTDC, cost around $200 million, and sits next to the company's existing facility by the international cable landing station. Two data halls, standby diesel generators, a footprint just under three quarters of a hectare. When it is finished, sometime next year, it will not employ many people. Facilities like it rarely do. Somebody has to run the cooling and check the racks, but the actual work is done by computers, and computers don't need parking. None of that makes it unusual. Most of the country is building these things. What makes SC2 worth a look is when it got its approval. June last year. Before the rules existed.

The federal government has been putting together new expectations for AI infrastructure: use water responsibly, put back into the grid roughly what you take out, help pay for the poles and wires you need. Sensible enough, on paper. Queensland's own newest arrival on the Sunshine Coast will not be required to meet any of it, because construction started before the expectations did. The government has confirmed as much. New facilities will be asked to show their working. This one was grandfathered straight through.

At least the electricity got a number attached to it, even one NEXTDC itself won't confirm. Nobody has put a figure on the water. Unitywater won't say how much SC2 is expected to use, or whether it will be drinking water or something recycled, citing customer privacy. Seqwater will only say it assesses each connection against supply as it comes. Here in the Blackall Ranges behind the coast sits Baroon Pocket, the dam that supplies most of the region's drinking water. It has, in wetter years, filled and spilled over its own wall. It has also, in drier ones, dropped low enough that Seqwater had to pipe water in from Brisbane to keep the taps running. Whichever tap SC2 ends up drawing from, it draws from the same system as everyone else on the coast whose water comes out of the wall, not off the roof.

That is not corruption. Nobody needs to whisper about brown paper bags. It is simply what happens when the rules for an industry arrive several years after the industry itself. It also happens to suit Queensland rather well. At a meeting of state and federal energy ministers this year, every jurisdiction except two agreed that new large data centres should have to underwrite their own additional renewable generation, so the rest of us aren't quietly subsidising somebody else's server farm. New South Wales agreed. Victoria agreed. South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT, all agreed. Queensland and the Northern Territory did not.

Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki explained the decision by saying Queensland wants data centres to be able to source their power "on a competitive" basis, and that a full renewable mandate "precludes more commercial outcome possibilities." It is the sort of sentence that has clearly been drafted by several careful people, and it translates, roughly, to: we'd rather not make them build the windfarm. Queensland has also put close to two billion dollars of public money behind coal and gas, and opened an energy fund for the state's north west that leaves the door open for gas alongside renewables. The government describes this as flexibility. It is certainly that.

So there is a pattern developing, and it is not especially subtle once you stand back from it. Elsewhere in the country, and increasingly overseas, people are starting to ask what a community gets in return for hosting a facility that drinks electricity by the town-load and offers comparatively few jobs once the tradesmen have gone. Queensland's answer has been to make itself the easiest possible place to avoid being asked.

The state, for its part, is fond of data centres in the way governments are fond of anything measured in billions. They turn up in speeches about pipelines and corridors and Queensland's digital future. They come with a number, a ribbon, occasionally a minister in a hard hat. What Maroochydore gets, once the ribbon has been packed away, is a shed, the knowledge that ten and a half thousand houses' worth of electricity is now spoken for, and no idea at all how much water has gone the same way.

A resident of Maroochydore driving past the cable landing station won't see any of this. They'll see a shed, some fencing, a sign about future opportunities. The interesting part isn't visible from the road. It's the timing. A facility that arrived just early enough to miss every question the country is now getting around to asking everyone else. Nobody made SC2 sneak in under the wire. It simply walked through a door that happened to be open, in a state that has since made a point of keeping more doors open behind it.

None of this is really about NEXTDC, which is Australian, ASX-listed, and reasonably candid about what SC2 is for: an "AI-ready" facility, part of a "sovereign Indo-Pacific digital gateway," built to carry the traffic of companies considerably larger than itself. Google is already next door, using the site for its new trans-Pacific cable. Those companies spent twenty years describing themselves as weightless, a cloud, a platform, something you carried in your pocket. It turns out the pocket needed a five-storey shed and a small town's worth of electricity, and people are starting to notice the gap between the pitch and the plumbing.

There may be an entirely reasonable case for all of this. Investment is real and construction jobs are real, for as long as the construction lasts. Queensland would rather have the shed built here than in Adelaide. It would just be nice to know, one day, what the rest of us get for supplying the power point.