Rampart Talks: Greg Boorer

My guest this month on Rampart Talks is CDC founder Greg Boorer.

Boorer dreamed up Canberra Data Centres in 2007 and over two decades of grind has grown it into a $20 billion company and trusted vendor to Australia's security agencies and largest corporations.

He now finds himself – in an exclusive club with his weird and wonderful industry rivals – riding a vertically accelerating technological step change underpinning the greatest investment mega-trend in history. CDC's last major contract, for 555 megawatts of customer storage, was equivalent to the aggregate size of every other deal CDC had done in the previous 19 years. What a time to be alive.

As Rampart revealed on Tuesday, Boorer dropped a bombshell in this interview: that CDC and Firmus have ended their much-vaunted $73 billion partnership to develop 1.6 gigawatts of AI compute in Australia by 2028.

Boorer also gave me his unvarnished views on the impending IPO of Firmus as "a very, very interested spectator", and his experience of working closely with its "super high energy" co-founder Oliver Curtis (himself a previous guest on Rampart Talks).

He also addressed the growing political backlash against data centres and the sudden interest of the Albanese government in regulating the industry.

Boorer spoke with particular reverence about CDC's former shareholder Quadrant Private Equity, whose founder Chris Hadley, Boorer says, "has probably forgotten more about business than most people ever know." And we traversed the arduous start-up years of CDC.

"That was literally the hardest two years of my life, because obviously a lot of money out the door, and wondering whether we could pay wages at the end of each month… It was amazing and in so many ways, it set the trajectory, the culture, the standards and the approach we have now. In those days, we had to be incredibly frugal and now that frugality is demonstrated in our margins and our profitability. The first seven years [I] never had a day off, never had a holiday, [and] if the tender was due, [I] wouldn't sleep for three or four days because we didn't have teams of people to rely on. But they were the making of me as a person. I wouldn't change a thing in hindsight, but people see the success of CDC today and have no idea what was required to get there."

Inevitably, Greg and I also discussed our mutual love of cricket. Boorer is chairman of Cricket ACT, harbours a burning ambition to secure a Canberra-based Big Bash League franchise and is scathing of the state cricket association powerbrokers who last month felled Cricket Australia chairman Mike Baird.

Cricket Australia, Boorer says, is "fighting a boxing match with one arm tied behind its back, because every decision or every strategy gets questioned. It gets re-prosecuted. The volume of work that the people have done at Cricket Australia over and over again on the same topics that have never gone anywhere lead to enforced mediocrity… People point to the inadequacies of Cricket Australia, but there are some pretty big shadows that are towering over Cricket Australia, and not much grows in the shade."

There is so much more in this episode, so I encourage you to access the full version, which runs for 66 minutes. The full version is only available to Rampart's premium subscribers, who can watch on rampart.news or listen via Spotify or Apple Podcasts (if you haven't already activated this integration with your preferred podcast app, you can do so here).

For Rampart's free list members, a 14-minute cut is available on rampart.news, YouTube and all the major podcast players.

I hope you enjoy it. 

Cheers, Joe

Previous episodes: James Packer, Gillon McLachlan, Brad Banducci, Jayne Hrdlicka, Nick Molnar, Matt Comyn, Oliver Curtis, Hamish Douglass, Ruthie Rogers, Todd Greenberg, John Mullen and Justice Michael Lee.