W hen West Footscray resident Sean Brown takes his 19-month-old boy to the park, their walk passes an imposing new building cheerily spruiked as “Australia’s largest hyperscale AI factory”, a datacentre called M3. He hates it: the construction noise from its constant expansion, the looming towers and the insistent background hum, the exhaust from the growing array of diesel generators that power the ranks of servers inside. And he worries what it represents for his young child’s future. “He is growing – neurologically, pulmonarily, physically – in the shadow of a facility whose cumulative environmental impact … has never been assessed,” Brown says. “They’re building something which is, frankly, terrible for the community. There’s no upside to it and it’s just getting worse.” The centre has already grown several times, fuelling the endless appetite of this age of digital services and generative AI.…