Sydney / Washington | The billionaire Australian businessman behind the AirTrunk data centre empire says Donald Trump’s $US500 billion ($799 billion) investment in digital infrastructure shows the importance of the sector and its key role in artificial intelligence.

Robin Khuda sold the company he founded to American investment giant Blackstone last year in a $23.5 billion deal, the largest data centre transaction of all time. Since then, big investors from David Di Pilla’s HMC Capital to Macquarie have been backing the development of data centres, which are used by tech giants for AI processing and storage.