Internal NSW government emails reveal AI giant Anthropic was interested in building up to 5 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity in NSW alone, a capacity that would be three times the size of Australia's entire data centre infrastructure.
USSC Director of Strategic Technologies Olivia Shen spoke with ABC on this development, saying its land mass, renewable energy capacity and stable democracy have cemented Australia as an attractive destination for US AI companies and that with "uncertainty about the regulatory landscape in the US, including a lot of local opposition to data centres... makes sense for Anthropic to want to diversify its compute and its business outside of the United States."