Australia's obsessions with social media and search engines, alongside a cloud computing drive from corporations, is powering the growth in energy intensive data centres, which now use as much energy as regional cities.

Deon Newman, vice-president of strategy for IBM Asia Pacific, explained that the world is creating more information every day than humanity did over the course of a century.

Australians are creating an information avalanche, and power hungry data centres are expanding to keep the info flowing.

“The reality is we're generating enormous amounts of data every single day; in two days we’re generating the same amount of information from year zero to 2005,” Mr Newman said during the Schneider Electric Innovation summit in Singapore.

This data is held in massive data centres, which are swiftly becoming the fastest-growing consumers of power in the country, and are expected to boom as demand grows for processing power for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and because every single Facebook post, tweet, and Instagram picture needs to be powered by something.