Anthropic Anchors Australia's Biggest Data Centre

Queensland Premier David Crisafulli announced on Tuesday that Anthropic has signed a lease at the Western Downs Digital Park, a proposed A$32 billion campus near Dalby, roughly 250 kilometres west of Brisbane. It is the company's first data-centre agreement in Australia, and it commits Anthropic to a site that does not yet have planning approval.

The lease covers the first stage only. The park is being developed by Singapore-headquartered Zerra DC, with Macquarie Capital and the Dexus-backed Australian Data Centres in the development consortium, and is designed for four halls totalling 1.44 gigawatts of IT capacity and a peak draw of 2.16 gigawatts. That would make it the largest facility of its kind in the country. Anthropic is targeting 2027 for the first hall; full build-out is expected to take four to six years.

Two approvals still stand between the announcement and any concrete. The development application was only filed with the Western Downs Regional Council in August and remains under assessment — Mayor Andrew Smith has confirmed the council has not ruled on it. Anthropic's lease is separately subject to clearance by the Foreign Investment Review Board.

What the site is for matters as much as its size. Anthropic says it will use the campus for inference — the compute that answers user requests to Claude — rather than for training new models. Inference workloads are latency-sensitive in a way training is not, which is the practical argument for putting capacity inside Australia at all rather than serving the region from Asia or the United States.

The company also went straight to a developer rather than renting wholesale from AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, a pattern Capacity reads as well-capitalised labs behaving like independent infrastructure tenants instead of cloud customers. It is the same structure Anthropic used when it put Macquarie and GIC behind a platform that builds and leases sites it will not own, and when it signed a 20-year, $19 billion lease with TeraWulf. Anthropic already has a memorandum of understanding with the Australian federal government under its National AI Plan.

The hard question in Queensland is power. At full capacity the park would draw around 47 gigawatt-hours a day against a state average of about 170 — an increase of roughly a quarter in Queensland's daily electricity use, or the equivalent of 1.5 million average Australian households. The developer plans to connect directly to a major substation serving south-east Queensland and New South Wales rather than through local distribution, drawing on three nearby gas-fired stations alongside solar and wind. Water use during operation, it says, would be comparable to a conventional office building of the same size.

That has opened a straightforward political split. The federal government wants renewables treated as the national standard for new data centres; Crisafulli has argued for an "energy-agnostic" approach, on the grounds that more generation of any kind pushes prices down. Engineer Andreas Helwig warned that "getting this wrong will impact grid stability and cost to consumers," and energy analyst Tim Buckley argued the industries of the future should not be run on the industries of the last century. Save Our Darling Downs spokesperson Liza Balmain raised coal seam gas and its effect on regional aquifers, and federal MP David Littleproud said local power reliability and cost cannot be compromised.

Australia is becoming an unusually crowded market for this kind of announcement — Sydney's Firmus is courting investors for a A$7 billion float on the strength of AI capacity of its own. The difference here is that the tenant is a frontier lab and the number attached is larger than almost anything else in the country. Until the council rules and the FIRB signs off, though, it is a lease on a plan.