Anthropic has signed its first data centre lease in Australia, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the deal. The campus is planned at 2.16 gigawatts, which would put it level with the largest facilities running anywhere today.
What’s planned
The site sits on farmland about 250 kilometres from Brisbane, in the Western Downs near Dalby. First capacity is meant to come online in 2027. The developer is Singapore-based Zerra DC, which according to Reuters plans to source power through renewable purchase agreements and to carry the grid connection costs itself, without passing them to existing customers.
Two details matter more than the gigawatt number. First: the facility is for inference — answering queries — not training. Australia has said its new AI rules will limit the use of domestically produced content for training. Second: cooling runs on a closed loop with air, which needs far less clean water than the usual approach.
The deal is subject to Foreign Investment Review Board approval. Anthropic and Zerra DC declined to comment.
The local fight has already started
Australian broadcaster ABC puts the project at $32 billion, on roughly 725 hectares, with about 1,000 ongoing jobs; the development application went in last month. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli is selling it as a win for jobs, the grid and power prices. The community group Save Our Darling Downs disagrees, and its objection lands exactly where Reuters and ABC diverge: ABC reports that Queensland secured an exemption from the federal requirement to anchor such sites to renewable generation only, which would put coal and gas into the mix.
The power draw is hard to talk down. ABC compares it to 1.5 million average Australian households.
Building continues while everyone talks about slowing down
The timing is the real story. Last week Dario Amodei asked the industry to slow the pace at the frontier. This week his company leases two gigawatts in Australia.
On paper that isn’t a contradiction: his proposal is about training new capability, and this site is explicitly for serving answers. But inference capacity isn’t neutral. Reserving 2.16 gigawatts for answers means planning for a lot more usage — and usage is the reason the next training run pencils out.
Australia, meanwhile, is pitching itself as the cheap, energy-rich alternative to congested markets in the US and Asia. Economists put possible investment at A$150 billion by 2030. From 2027 the government wants limits on land, water and electricity use — the same year the first servers are supposed to start up.
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