Civic compute: indicative costing
Status: indicative, for scoping conversation only - not a costing submission. Every figure is an estimate with its assumption stated, marked [inferred], rounded deliberately coarse, in Australian dollars. The purpose is to establish the order of magnitude and the cost structure, both of which survive even if individual figures move by half.
The unit: one community node
A community node is a rack in a council building, not a data centre. Indicative bill, per site [inferred throughout]:
- Compute: four workstation-class inference servers (modern multi-GPU consumer/prosumer hardware), storage array, networking, UPS, rack and cooling allowance - roughly $100,000-160,000 capital, amortised over four years.
- Fit-out and power works for a council-building room: $20,000-50,000 once, highly site-dependent.
- Power draw at realistic community duty cycles: a few thousand dollars a year, not a material line.
- Connectivity: existing council links suffice for a pilot; allowance $5,000 a year.
- The dominant cost is a person. One librarian-technologist per site - the staff member who makes it a library rather than a locked room - at a loaded cost around $120,000-140,000 a year. This is not overhead to minimise; it is the service.
Indicative per-site total: roughly $180,000-230,000 a year, all-in, amortised. Staffing is 60-70 per cent of it - the same cost structure as a public library, because it is the same kind of institution.
The pilot: three councils, two years
Choose three sites for contrast - one metro, one regional, one remote - with central program support of about one FTE plus evaluation:
- Three sites, two years, all-in: roughly $1.1-1.4 million
- Program coordination and published evaluation: $250,000-400,000
- Pilot total: order of $1.5-2 million over two years.
For calibration: that is less than a single mid-sized policy consultancy engagement, and it produces public uptake data instead of a deck.
National scale, for shape only
Australia has roughly 500-plus local government areas. Full national coverage at the per-site figures above lands in the order of $100-120 million a year - dominated, again, by the ~500 librarian-technologists. That is to say: dominated by jobs, distributed across every LGA in the country, many regional. For comparison, Australia's public libraries operate at roughly ten times that annual figure [inferred, coarse]. Nobody should fund national scale from this page. The pilot exists precisely so that scale decisions ride on measured uptake rather than estimates like these.
What the structure tells you regardless of the figures
Hardware is the cheap part and getting cheaper; people are the cost and the point. Any program design that tries to remove the librarian-technologist to save money removes the library and keeps the rack. The second structural fact: because staffing dominates, the marginal cost of generosity in hardware is small - specify the nodes well.
Written with model assistance. Read and edited by a human - though I'm not an editor, so tell me what I've missed: drop me a line. Figures are indicative estimates with stated assumptions, and corrections from anyone who runs real infrastructure are actively wanted.
Reviewed and checked by the human author: 2026-07-20.