The robot dogs everyone watched get kicked on YouTube are now $300,000 security guards. Australia is building the world's second-biggest pile of data centres for them to patrol.
Boston Dynamics says data centre interest has surged, with Spot now selling for up to $300,000 and paying for itself inside two years.
The robot dogs are coming to Australia's data centres.
Boston Dynamics says interest from data centre operators has surged over the past year.
"I was literally at a data center this week," the company's Merry Frayne told Business Insider. "We've seen a huge, huge uptick in interest from data centers in the last year, I'd say, which is probably not surprising given the investment in that space."
Spot costs between $175,000 and $300,000 depending on how it is fitted out. Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 starts at $165,000. A human guard costs about $150,000 a year, and Boston Dynamics says customers typically see the machines pay for themselves inside two years.
They patrol perimeters, map sites, inspect equipment and pick up leaks and thermal faults before they turn into outages.
Australians have been watching these things for eighteen years without being told what they were for.
BigDog arrived in 2005, built with Pentagon money as a pack mule for American infantry in Afghanistan.
The clip that made it famous went up in March 2008. A technician boots it across an icy car park and it staggers, skitters and stays upright. Seventeen million views. The top comment reads: "PLEASE DO NOT KICK THE WALKING PROTOTYPE DEATH MECH. IT WILL REMEMBER."
Founder Marc Raibert told Forbes he got letters asking him to stop. "Other companies build these things and are afraid to scratch them," he said. "We beat the crap out of ours, and they get tougher."
Spot arrived in 2015 and got kicked too, in a hallway and then a car park. It went on sale in 2020 for $74,500. In November 2024 the Secret Service walked one around the grounds of Mar-a-Lago.
Eighteen years after the car park, it does backflips.
Then there are the buildings.
Australia is the world's second-largest destination for data centre investment after the United States, according to the Climate Council. There are 162 operating and more than 90 in the pipeline.
The Commonwealth Bank put a figure on it this week: about six gigawatts proposed, four times what was running at the end of 2025, and around $150 billion of construction by 2030.
Half of that capacity is in New South Wales. About a quarter is in Victoria, where Premier Jacinta Allan said last November the state would be "ruthless" competing for it.
Anthropic told developers in July it wants to make Australia its second home outside the United States, and that it wants Australian data centres.
The distributor is already here. Corematic Engineering is Boston Dynamics' accredited Australian partner, and Woodside is a reference customer on its books.
No Australian data centre operator has said publicly that it runs one.
Given what is being approved in Melbourne's west, that is a question of timing.