Critical Technologies in Australia: The Policy Roadmap in 2026
Updated: Jul 13
For much of the past decade, “critical technologies” existed in government policy papers and strategic briefings, rather than mainstream corporate strategy. That separation is fast disappearing.
Governments across advanced economies in 2026 are increasingly viewing technological capability as a determinant of economic resilience, national security and geopolitical influence. Industrial-policy tools are again being deployed at a scale not seen for decades. Supply chains are fast becoming instruments of economic security as well as mechanisms of efficiency. Export controls are expanding. Public capital is flowing into sectors once left largely to private markets.
What is emerging is not a short-term regulatory response, but a longer-term shift in how advanced economies approach strategic technological capability. The underlying assumption, increasingly shared across advanced economies, is that markets alone will not reliably deliver resilience, technological sovereignty, or national-security objectives in strategically important sectors.
For boards, investors, universities and counsel advising in technology-intensive sectors, Australia’s critical technology framework now forms part of the baseline operating environment. The framework embodies Australia’s reaction to that broader international realignment.
Australia is reacting to a global trend
The international pattern is difficult to miss. Across the OECD and beyond, governments are again using industrial policy measures, economic-security frameworks, investment incentives and technology strategies to support select technologies that they regard as important to national resilience, security or competitiveness.
Examples include the United States CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022; the European Chips Act (EU Reg 2023/1781), the Net-Zero Industry Act (EU Reg 2024/1735) and the European Economic Security Strategy 2023; the United Kingdom’s National Semiconductor Strategy 2023; Japan’s Economic Security Promotion Act (No. 43 of 2022); South Korea’s 2023 amendments to the Restriction of Special Taxation Act, known as the "K-Chips Act"; and India’s various Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes relating to electronics, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing.
The underlying logic is strategic national resilience in the face of increased geopolitical and supply-chain risk. Across such inputs as semiconductors, critical minerals, batteries, cloud infrastructure and advanced manufacturing materials, governments are increasingly viewing concentrated offshore dependency as a strategic vulnerability, rather than an acceptable facet of globalisation. That shift is reshaping procurement decisions, investment screening, stockpiling strategies, and trade regulation. Australia's approach is part of that shift.
What are Australia's critical technologies?
Australia’s working definition is captured in the List of Critical Technologies in the National Interest, maintained by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. There are seven key fields:
advanced manufacturing and materials technologies;
artificial intelligence technologies;
advanced information and communication technologies;
quantum technologies;
autonomous systems, robotics, positioning, timing and sensing;
biotechnologies; and
clean energy generation and storage technologies
The list is not, in itself, a regulatory instrument. Its significance is that it now informs a growing number of government programs, investment initiatives and policy settings. For example: the National Reconstruction Fund, including its Enabling Capabilities investment priority; Australia’s Economic Accelerator; the Trailblazer Universities Program; the National Quantum Strategy; the National Artificial Intelligence Centre; the Critical Minerals Strategy 2023-2030; aspects of AUKUS Pillar II; and the Defence Industry Development Strategy, among others. A whole-of-government structure coordinates this work through the Critical Technologies Hub within the Commonwealth Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR).
The regulatory architecture
The regulatory architecture supporting the framework features three distinct modes of regulation:
Investment regulation: Foreign investment review under Australia's Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act (FATA), with the Foreign Investment Review Board and Commonwealth Treasurer scrutinising transactions more closely where they touch the seven key fields.
Operational regulation: The Security of Critical Infrastructure Act, the developing AI guardrail regime, cyber obligations arising under Australia’s expanding cyber-security regime, and Sovereign Defence Industrial Priorities for businesses adjacent to defence procurement. The range of actitivities subject to regulatory oversight continues to broaden.
Trade regulation: The Defence Trade Controls Act amendments, the AUKUS export-control exemption arrangement with the United States and United Kingdom, sanctions regimes, and the broader extraterritorial reach of each jurisdiction’s technology controls.
For many businesses operating internationally, the commercial problem in 2026 is one of managing a dynamic global patchwork of such regulation. Global transactions face the cumulative interaction between investment screening, operational-security obligations, export controls, cybersecurity regulation and alliance-based technology restrictions, all engaged simultaneously. A cross-border M&A transaction involving an AI-related target, for example, could potentially trigger all five at once.
Artificial intelligence as a driver in 2026
Australia's critical technologies list places artificial intelligence (AI) alongside six other fields. In practice, AI now sits at the centre of critical technologies policy globally.
The reason is fairly simple. AI capability cuts across nearly every other priority: defence, productivity, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, scientific research, workforce transformation and national competitiveness. The strategic stakes, including compute capacity, sovereign datasets, model capability and talent concentration, are both commercial and geopolitical.
Current policy settings suggest that Australia is likely to align more closely with overseas approaches that treat AI as both an economic and a security issue. The direction favours clearer expectations on critical infrastructure operators’ use of AI; focused investment in sovereign compute and data; and sharper foreign-investment scrutiny of AI-relevant transactions. Policy-makers in a number of jurisdictions are also examining whether advanced AI systems and some of their enabling technologies should be subject to more formal regulsatory oversight.
In Australia, the Voluntary AI Safety Standard and the work on mandatory guardrails for high-risk AI are early steps in a regulatory environment that is yet to mature.
Sovereign capability: compute, energy, minerals
The strategic question in 2026 is not simply whether Australians can access advanced AI systems. Rather, what matters is whether Australia can develop and retain meaningful sovereign capability across the full AI ecosystem, including compute, energy, datasets, infrastructure and specialised talent.
Today, frontier AI development is concentrated in jurisdictions with access to advanced semiconductors, large-scale computational infrastructure, and relatively abundant energy. The geopolitical consequences of that concentration are being ever more relevant to trade, investment and national security policy.
For Australia, this raises longer-term questions extending well beyond AI regulation including whether critical digital infrastructure remains domestically resilient, how dependent Australian industry becomes on offshore model providers, and whether strategic capability can realistically exist without corresponding compute and energy capacity.
The same logic applies to critical minerals. Australia’s natural-resource endowment is significant, but the strategic value is migrating downstream, to processing, refining and integration into allied battery and defence supply chains. The National Critical Minerals Strategy 2023-2030, the AUD 4 billion Critical Minerals Facility and the AUD 1 billion Value Adding in Resources Fund reflect a policy focus of moving further along the value chain, rather than simply increasing resource extraction.
Energy belongs in the same conversation. Grid reliability, clean-energy generation and data-centre infrastructure are no longer separable from technology policy; they are now inputs into it. Australia’s comparative advantage in renewable energy is liekly to shape its capacity to host sovereign compute, refine critical minerals and attract advanced-manufacturing investment over the coming decade.
For Australian businesses, the question runs beyond regulatory compliance into strategic dependency. Many businesses rely heavily on globally-concentrated cloud, semiconductor and frontier-model infrastructure that sits largely outside Australian control. The exposure is not theoretical: changes in export-control settings, geopolitical alignment, compute availability or foreign regulatory priorities can shape which technologies Australian businesses are able to access, deploy or scale. Some boards are starting to treat strategic dependency as a distinct category of risk, sitting alongside cyber, financial and operational risk on the register.
Export controls and regulatory fragmentation
The global regulatory environment is increasingly fragmenting along geopolitical lines. This is one of the most significant emerging commercial issues facing Australian businesses operating internationally in 2026.
The international direction of travel includes increased focus on outbound investment screening mechanisms, tightening semiconductor and AI-chip controls, growing policy discussion around controls on advanced AI systems, cross-border data localisation requirements, broader extraterritorial reach of national regimes, and explicit alliance-based coordination through groupings such as the G7 and the Quad.
The trend appears to be toward greater alignment with security partnerships and less reliance on globally consistent technology rules. The practical and legal consequences run through a broad suite of commercial arrangements, including cross-border M&A, research collaboration, cloud and infrastructure decisions, AI deployment, venture capital flows, university partnerships and supply-chain design. For multinationals headquartered or operating in Australia, the compliance task is rarely principally domestic. Businesses operating across advanced jurisdictions are often navigating overlapping, sometimes inconsistent, regulatory regimes.
Impact on university research
Few sectors will be more affected than higher education. Globally, through Trusted Research frameworks in the United Kingdom, expanded NSPM-33 obligations in the United States, and equivalent reforms across advanced jurisdictions, universities are being drawn into the national-security architecture.
Australia may follow a similar approach. Early indicators include more rigorous foreign-collaboration disclosure, sharper scrutiny of partnerships with entities of concern, sensitive-research governance frameworks, data-handling and localisation expectations, and grant conditionality tied to research-security compliance.
For university councils and senior counsel, research collaboration arrangements that were unproblematic five years ago may well warrant careful review. The reputational and regulatory costs of getting this wrong are rising quickly.
Conclusion
Australia's framework is better understood as part of a broader response to a more contested geopolitical environment, than as a collection of stand-alone innovation initiatives. The framework is part of a broader international trend in which governments are more willing to find, protect and, in some cases, restrict access to technologies that regard as important to their national interest.
What does this mean for Australian technology businesses? Technological capability, particularly in AI, involves important strategic consequences. Decisions about infrastructure, supply chains, capital allocation, data governance and technology deployment are increasingly intersecting with national-security considerations and geopolitical risk. However, the policy roadmap for 2026 provides a useful guide as to how Australia intends to participate in, and benefit from, current technological innovation. Collectively, the policy roadmap will assist Australia to translate global science fiction into Australian science fact.
Disclaimer: these are the author's personal views. They do not constitute legal advice and do not represent the views of the author's firm or any client.
Authored by Dr Martyn Taylor of Norton Rose Fulbright
Partner & Board Member, Norton Rose Fulbright | Co-Head of TMT, Trade, Competition
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Martyn Taylor is a lawyer at global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright based in Sydney. He co-heads the telecommunications and media group (ranked Tier 1 in APAC), and the competition/antitrust and trade group (ranked Tier 1 in Sydney and Melbourne). He is described as “smart, efficient, friendly”.
Martyn’s practice covers transactional, contentious and advisory. He is a corporate and commercial lawyer and a well-known telecommunications, internet, media and technology (TMT), infrastructure/utilities, energy, competition and regulatory specialist.
Martyn has been endorsed as a 'top 10' TMT legal advisors in Asia. He is recommended by the key legal directories, including Best Lawyers. Recent awards include:
Australian Law Firm Partner of the Year - Competition, Trade & Regulation, 2023
Australian Law Firm Partner of the Year - Commercial, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021
Australian Law Firm Partner of the Year - TMT, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022
Best Utilities Project (Global) – World Bank Partnerships Awards, 2022 (Ethiopian telecoms rollout)
M&A Deal of the Year – Australasian Law Awards, 2016, 2021 (Vodafone/TPG merger)
Best M&A Deal - Finance Asia, 2020 (Vodafone/TPG merger)