In a Herald NOW Business interview with Garth Bray, Liddell added that the Government could potentially introduce tax breaks for small to medium businesses that adopt AI.
Liddell didn’t seem keen on the Crown bankrolling an AI Sovereign Infrastructure Fund.
“There’s a bit of a mentality that the Government needs to solve our problems,” he said.
“Who else is going to chip in for an AI sovereign fund?” Bray asked.
Liddell took the conversation elsewhere, but later, talking on Ryan Bridge TODAY, Bray answered his own question. Super funds could potentially contribute to Liddell’s mooted fund.
Sir Rod Drury, who has been campaigning for New Zealand to overbuild renewable power, in part to facilitate datacentres for weightless exports, told the Herald he backed Liddell’s aims.
But Simplicity founder Sam Stubbs was down on the idea of any of his firm’s KiwiSaver funds chipping in to a Sovereign AI Infrastructure Fund.
‘Carpetbaggers’
“What is it that New Zealand brings? I disagree on using our clean renewable energy for powering AI,” Stubbs told Tech Insider.
“We don’t have enough of that for our own needs, let alone for what I would classify as carpetbaggers coming in, building expensive datacentres, taking base-load power, providing very few jobs, and seeking, as any multinational does, to minimise tax paid.
“So I just don’t see the net benefit to New Zealand of that as a sovereign or investment strategy that makes sense at a national scale.
“In fact, then the indications are that New Zealand is a pretty unattractive place for datacentres, and power is expensive, and we’re far away. If we were that attractive, then Microsoft, Google and Amazon would have already built significant facilities here, not the relatively small data centres they’ve built so far.”
After pressing the Government to fast-track consents, and buying a giant parcel of land in Auckland’s Westgate, Amazon ultimately abandoned construction of a hyperscale datacentre of its own, in favour of leasing space with third-party operators (never named but widely assumed to include half-Infratil-owned CDC and Brookfield’s DCI).
Similarly, Microsoft lobbied the Government and won Overseas Investment Office approval to buy two properties in Auckland’s northwest, but so far has only built on one.
Google has never announced any plans for a local data centre.
The global tech giants argue they’ve directly helped finance the construction of more renewable power.
Microsoft said in December 2024: “A 10-year contract with Microsoft supported Contact Energy’s investment decision to construct the Te Huka 3 geothermal power station, which can generate 51.4 megawatts of reliable and renewable generation throughout the year.”
And in 2023, Amazon signed with Mercury in 2023 to take half the output from the gentailer’s new 103MW windfarm south of Palmerston North for 15 years.
Transpower says New Zealand’s growing power infrastructure can accommodate the giant Southland datacentre proposed by privately-owned Datagrid, but at the same time, it has yet to consent to the project.
Datagrid’s plan is to export its “AI factory” capacity via a new international fibre optic cable that would connect Southland with Australia and beyond, but it is currently reassessing options after its initial partner, Chorus, pulled out citing lack of pre-sales demand and potential delays until 2030 due to industry shortages.
A spokesman for the NZ Super Fund said, “It looks like Chris Liddell was calling for the establishment of a new fund, rather than a change to our mandate. Either way, one for the politicians rather than for us.”
The Government has so far allocated no new funding towards AI. The coming NZ Institute for Advanced Technology is bankrolled with $70 million saved by defunding Callaghan Innovation, and a $765,000 pilot to encourage small businesses to adopt AI uses money pulled from other Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) projects.
In its AI strategy, the Government outlined its main role as keeping out of the way of innovation by introducing no new regulations to stifle the growth of AI. Government departments and agencies have been encouraged to adopt artificial intelligence for efficiency, but so far, spending on the new technology has been in the single-digit millions for IRD, Health NZ, MBIE and others.
‘Already a lot of exposure to AI’
“I can’t say categorically if a sovereign AI fund is a good idea, because the devil is in the details,” Stubbs said.
“But if you look at the average Kiwisaver fund, they have a lot of exposure to AI already.
“If you look at their top 20 holdings, many of them will be the big tech giants, who are obviously heavily involved in AI.”
The Anthropic and OpenAI public listings, expected later this year, will add to that exposure, Stubbs says.
The Simplicity MD sees if not a bubble, then at least a money-go-round, with Nvidia supplying tens of billions in finance to datacentre builders, who then use the funds to buy its product.
The Government’s superannuation fund has also become AI-heavy.
In its most recent portfolio disclosure, the NZ Super Fund said it had shares in Nvidia worth $2.38 billion, making it the $87b fund’s largest single holding.
The Super Fund also has sizeable parcels of shares in Apple ($1.59b), Microsoft ($1.92b), Google parent Alphabet ($1.02b), Amazon ($969m), Meta ($754m), Broadcom ($731m), IBM ($571m), Tesla ($544m), Oracle ($219m) and Palantir ($106m), among other global tech giants associated with AI.
In terms of local firms, the Super Fund has $515m indirectly invested in datacentre expansion via its investments in NZX-listed Infratil (which owns half of CDC, the builder of four giant data centres around northwest Auckland) and Datacom, which has just bought the IBM-built data centre in East Tamaki to expand its data centre portfolio.
Stubbs also opposes Liddell’s mooted tax breaks to encourage small to medium businesses to adopt AI.
“If it makes sense, you’ll do it anyway,” he said.
“A lot of AI is becoming commoditised. Businesses are adopting it without even realising.”
MIA confirms huge jump in EV sales
The Herald earlier reported big jumps in weekly EV and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) new and New Zealand-new registrations, according to Ministry of Transport figures over March.
Registration stats from the Motor Industry Association (MIA) confirm the sales bump for new vehicles as petrol prices spiked with the Iran conflict.
The MIA says total new vehicle registrations rose by 3003 or 25.2% compared with March last year to 14,908.
There was growth across the board, but sales of new EVs jumped from 638 in March 2024 (5.4% of the market) to 2422 (16.2%).
Sales of plug-in hybrids rose from 467 (3.9% of the market) in March 2024 to 1439 (9.7%).
Tesla (480 vehicles) was the top-selling EV marquee for March, ahead of BYD (322) – although the two EV vehicles came from different directions.
Elon Musk’s firm didn’t make the February top five, presumably because it had no shipment of vehicles arrive that month. BYD, on the other hand, said it sold out in March. The Chinese company says it has reinforcements for April and May and its largest-ever shipment on the way in June.
There was a similar trend in other countries. EV sales doubled across the Tasman, with BYD (4206) number one and Tesla (3485) number two.
On April 2, Tesla said its March-quarter global sales were up 6.3%, reversing three consecutive quarters of declines. But it was shy of the growth analysts had been expecting, and its shares continued their recent slide.
He might have easily the largest bonus in the offing (US$1 trillion/$1.71t if certain milestones – currently looking very far away – are hit) but Musk’s firm is the worst performer of the “Magnificent Seven” year-to-date.
What does ChatGPT fib?
TikTok creator Husk (@huskistaken) has developed a huge following with his comedy clips that make the serious point that ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and other AI chatbots often make basic blunders with spelling, counting, language translation and other tasks.
In one of his recent viral videos, he asked ChatGPT to time him running a mile. He jumped offscreen for a couple of seconds, then asked him how long it had taken. ChatGPT replied “10 minutes and 12 seconds”.
Various other attempts garnered equally loopy replies.
The Mostly Human podcast showed OpenAI founder Sam Altman the “10 minutes and 12 seconds clip”.
Altman chuckled and said the timer – or lack of – was a “known issue”.
It would be “maybe another year before something like that works well”, Altman said.
He did not address the larger issue: why ChatGPT claims it can time a run, when it can’t.
In his inimitable fashion, Husk got ChatGPT to respond to its creator’s comments. “I can absolutely keep track of time for you,” it insists. Enjoy:
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
