Leigh Jasper
I'm in San Francisco this week. So is the Deputy Prime Minister, but we’re here for very different reasons. He's meeting with Anthropic and OpenAI, working on Australia’s data centre pipeline. I'm here as the co-founder of @_Firmable and a Partner at @GlitchCapital, meeting with Australian founders who moved here this year. The CGT changes came up in almost every conversation as part of the reason they left Australia to build their business in the US. What a mess. The AFR published two opinion pieces todaythat demonstrate this shambles. In the first, Treasurer Jim Chalmers set out how Australia can benefit from AI if we get it right. And that’s a big if. The headline number he was spruiking was $150 billion of data centre investment by 2030. Jim, data centres are the bottom of the stack. Concrete, power and imported GPUs. Enormous capex, very few jobs, and negligible compounding growth for our country. If that's only our AI strategy, we’re in trouble, as we're importing expensive chips, hosting someone else's product, and then buying the intelligence built on top of it at full retail. The bigger opportunity is in using and complementing the frontier models. Products built on top of frontier models that solve real business problems. That's where jobs are created and where the productivity Chalmers is chasing actually comes from. I’m seeing it at what we’re building at Firmable, the companies we invest in at Glitch and the founders I’m meeting in the Bay Area. In the second op-ed, @Shaun_Cartoon laid out what Chalmers is actually doing to the people who build that layer. Effective rates for founder and employee equity are doubling to 47%, which is why founders are leaving. Australia is courting the frontier labs on one hand, and taxing the hell out of the Australian founders and builders. You can't be a value-add exporter of AI when the value-adders are in San Francisco. If Australia is serious about backing innovation, restore the 50% CGT discount for all businesses. This alone will generate far greater productivity gains for our country than data centres will.