Happy Tuesday!
Kia ora Caffeinators,
Another old fashioned Daily Shot this morning with a vintage Tuesday morning report to parse, a great pod to listen to, event to shout out and a parting shot which will give you your requisite dose of fear - just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about.
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Report: Empowering Aotearoa New Zealand’s Digital Future
Pod Pick: Pod Pick: How to get Chat GPT to recommend your product
Event: Startup Weekend returns to Wellington
AI warning: If anyone builds it, everyone dies
As always, thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription or simply recommended Caffeine to friends and whānau. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Report: Empowering Aotearoa New Zealand’s Digital Future - As I think I wrote literally last week, we love a Tuesday morning report here at Caffeine. And they keep on coming! This one is all about what is quietly becoming the backbone of New Zealand’s digital economy - data centres. According to a new NZTech report, Empowering Aotearoa New Zealand’s Digital Future, we now have 56 operational data centres with another 20 in the pipeline, anchoring everything from government services and health systems to banking, e-commerce and AI. Together, they’re enabling $16.5B in ICT GDP and supporting a further $76.5B in knowledge-intensive industries.
The report highlights how NZ’s facilities are among the world’s most efficient, and increasingly powered by renewables. That efficiency, combined with an investment wave topping $10B over the next decade, is set to create thousands of jobs — from construction to cloud engineers — while doubling the sector’s workforce by 2030
Beyond infrastructure, NZ’s renewable energy mix and political stability put it in pole position to become a regional hub for sustainable cloud and AI services. But the report also warns: without matching growth in power generation and grid resilience, the opportunity could quickly turn into a bottleneck. Industry and government collaboration will be crucial if Aotearoa is to turn its digital backbone into a strategic export advantage.
One note I found particularly interesting was that data centres currently account for 0.6% of total electricity use in the country but that number is set to triple by 2030 and presumably only increase from there. The question of how we power our digital future in a sustainable way is only growing more urgent - looking at you energy startups.
Read the full report here.
Pod Pick: How to get Chat GPT to recommend your product - Great listen from Lenny’s Newslettter here ( which you should also sub to). When I’m not Caffeinating, I do some PR and comms work too and something that’s increasingly important to all the businesses I work with is how they get their name ranked higher in AI generated answers. The previous age of internet was dominated by SEO, search engine optimisation, the new age will be dominated by AEO - or put simply, how to get Chat GPT to recommend your product.
Event: Startup Weekend returns to Wellington - We love the Startup Weekend events here at Caffeine and Startup Weekend Wellington is back this October, designed for mates, early teams, and solo builders ready to team up and get moving. Over an action-packed 54 hours, you’ll experience the highs, lows, fun, and pressure of building a start-up, from the ground up. Whether you come with a team ready to evolve your idea, arrive solo with a spark of inspiration, or join forces with others to launch something new, this is your space to build, collaborate, and watch your ideas take flight.
Time & Location
10 - 12 October 2025
Victoria University Wellington, 33 Bunny Street, Pipitea, Wellington 6011, New Zealand
If anyone builds it, everyone dies: As a parting shot I’m throwing out one for the A.I doomers in the audience. Eliezer Yudkowsky is perhaps the loudest and best known voice warning that we are on a path to catastrophe and he has a new book (landing this Thursday in NZ) with perhaps the most frighteningly effective tile I’ve ever heard. If you want to hear a summary of his thoughts, check out this interview he did with the NYT or pick it up yourself in the commend days. I’m not saying I agree with Eliezer and many people smarter than me don’t but he’s a serious thinker making a serious argument which is at the very least worth taking seriously.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co