Governance Stewardship as Adaptive Recalibration Architecture: Adaptive Capacity, Ecological Limits, and the Governance of AI Data-Centre Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence is materially dependent on extensive physical infrastructure. Large-scale data centres require land, continuous electricity, cooling resources, telecommunications, construction materials and supporting networks, while their cumulative consequences extend across energy, water, air-quality, ecological, community and public-infrastructure systems. This discussion paper argues that the central governance question is not simply whether an individual facility can satisfy an approval process. It is whether governance can recognise consequential change, evaluate uncertainty and cumulative effects, identify limits, and alter a development pathway before minimum sustaining conditions or future adaptive capacity are irreversibly diminished. The paper formally names the Starre ORIUS-RCA Decision-Making Architecture: Observe, Recognise, Interpret, Understand, Steward, ReOrient, Connect and Act/Apply. ReOrient is the decision anchor through which a warranted position is established or reset. Connect asks why the matter is significant now, to whom, to what and across which relationships; it develops Resonance Empathy Capacity by turning recognition into relational significance before action. Governance Stewardship is the wider practice and research framework; Starre ORIUS-RCA is its sequenced decision architecture; Adaptive Recalibration Architecture describes the recursive governance arrangement that connects the sequence to threshold assessment, authorised response, implementation and renewed learning. The paper reports bounded method-development evidence from a three-pilot program using public information: two completed retrospective reviews and one live prospective pilot under locked pre-decision controls. The Australian AI data-centre policy context is used as the principal application, supported by comparative evidence from the United States. Particular attention is given to cumulative electricity demand, carbon and water footprints, recharge integrity, land and ecological limits, artificial electromagnetic fields and pollinator systems, continuous operational noise, on-site fossil generation and backup generators, air pollution and public-health exposure, waste heat, public notice, public-value accounting and the risk that claims of urgency or strategic significance override ordinary safeguards.