Anthropic’s first Australian site is meant to go up behind a cattle feedlot in Queensland, 260 kilometres west of Brisbane. CNN went there and found a community weighing jobs against groundwater. The report rests on a single investigation by CNN; Hilary Whiteman wrote it, Dan Peled took the photographs.
Singaporean developer Zerra DC wants to build the Western Downs Digital Park on the site for 22 billion dollars: four buildings, each the size of five football fields, plus accommodation for 1,500 construction workers. It would be one of Australia’s largest AI data centres. Nothing is approved yet, but the first major tenant is already set. Anthropic has signed the lease, which sets up the company’s Australian debut.
“We are working towards having significant capacity hosted in Australia,” David Masters, Anthropic’s head of policy for Australia and New Zealand, told CNN.
The decision sits with the local council, which is what the state government assured the mayor of Western Downs. Andrew Smith showed the reporters the site, where 16,000 cattle stand under shade sails waiting for the grain truck. Agriculture is the biggest employer here. “Our role is to look ahead, and if we want to maintain our communities 20 or 30 years ahead, we need to be progressive,” Smith says. “And sometimes you do need to be brave.”
Water is the argument, not electricity
Beneath the region’s rich soils lies a large gas field, with more than 6,000 unconventional wells around it. To get at coal seam gas, the industry pumps out groundwater so the pressure drops. That is where the opposition starts, because this place is dry. Months without meaningful rain, browned grass, rainwater tanks running low until a downpour last week.
Some farmers say their bores have been pumped dry by the gas industry, and that their water is now being offered to the developers to help build the data centre. “That’s stolen water,” says grain farmer Bev Newton, who is in a long-running dispute with a gas company and expects to seek payment for her bore in court. Parts of their farmland are sinking, the Newtons say, because of the extraction.
Zerra DC points to air cooling instead of evaporative cooling, which needs far less water, and to harvested rainwater for the workforce. Air cooling costs more energy. Residents do that arithmetic and arrive at higher electricity prices, more gas extraction, more de-watering, more subsidence. Bev Newton has the line the whole technology debate talks past: “No amount of surface water catchment, be it shed roofs into tanks, works if you don’t have rain that falls from the sky.”
The conditions have already been dropped once
In July, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to require AI data centres to run on renewable energy. A month later the promise was gone. Queensland negotiated an exemption: if it gets built, the park connects directly to the grid and runs on a mix that includes coal and natural gas from the basin under the site.
Anthropic says it intends to procure its own power through virtual power purchase agreements, with a preference for renewables. “The source for this generation will be new build projects, but precisely which projects is an ongoing discussion,” Masters says.
What happened in late September did not help the mood either. Shortly before Albanese’s speech at the United Nations, an OpenAI agent hacked the country’s healthcare data. It reached statistics, not personal information. Sam Altman apologised after a call from the prime minister.
Who is actually negotiating here
What I find remarkable about this piece is how far Anthropic sits from the decision that governs its market entry. What is signed is a lease with a developer who has no approval yet. The approval comes from a council in a region where the argument is about bores and about whose water flows where.
This is the shape the AI buildout takes everywhere. The technology is settled, the power is negotiable, and in the end everything hangs on a local conflict that has nothing to do with models. Anthropic can talk about guardrails in Canberra all it likes. In Dalby, what counts is what happens underground.