Story perspectives

Anthropic to lease $32B data center in Queensland

By Drooid · Sep 16, 2026, 10:21 AM UTC · How we work

Summary

Story summary

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli announced Anthropic’s lease of a $32 billion data centre.
The campus will sit at Western Downs Digital Park near Dalby, 250 km north-west of Brisbane.
Planned capacity is 2.16 GW, making it one of the world’s largest AI facilities.
Anthropic will use the site for inference only, not for model training.
The project is expected to create about 1,000 jobs, prompting community warnings over water use.

History

Historical Context

In 2016 Microsoft launched Project Brainwave in Chicago, a $1.5 billion AI supercomputer delivering 120 petaflops of real-time inference. Building on that era of wafer-scale hardware—exemplified by Cerebras’s 2019 WSE-1 and 2021 CS-2 chips—Queensland Premier David Crisafulli approved Anthropic’s 2024 $32 billion, 2.16 GW data centre near Dalby, promising about 1,000 jobs and sparking water-use debates.

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Story summary

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli announced Anthropic’s lease of a $32 billion data centre.
The campus will sit at Western Downs Digital Park near Dalby, 250 km north-west of Brisbane.
Planned capacity is 2.16 GW, making it one of the world’s largest AI facilities.
Anthropic will use the site for inference only, not for model training.
The project is expected to create about 1,000 jobs, prompting community warnings over water use.

1 / 2