Anthropic lands deal in $31bn datacentre in western Queensland

Anthropic, the company behind the large language model (an AI trained on massive amounts of text to generate human-like responses) Claude, has agreed to build its first Australian datacentre in western Queensland at a reported cost of $31.9 billion. The facility will be powered by existing coal generators rather than renewable energy, after Queensland secured an exemption from a national requirement for new AI datacentres to use clean power sources. The datacentre is expected to create jobs and open in 2025, though concerns have been raised about how AI companies may gain access to Australian creative works to train their models.