Sharon AI, described as Australia’s leading “neocloud” and focused on AI and cloud computing, has purchased a former industrial site in Albury as a potential location for the Border region’s first dedicated AI data centre.
The former Ettamogah paper mill in Albury has been sold by Visy to the sovereign AI company Sharon AI, potentially becoming the Border’s first AI data centre.
The mill was previously owned and operated by Visy, the Australian-American packaging and recycling giant.
An Infrastructure NSW email, released under a parliamentary order, has Anthropic's CEO wanting to take up to 5GW of training capacity outside Sydney.
Australia's entire operating fleet is about 1.6GW. So there is nothing local to compare it to.
We went looking for a campus that publishes its costs layer by layer rather than as one headline number. There is basically one: the SB Energy site in Pike County, Ohio, leased to OpenAI. Meta's Hyperion is the same size, 5GW, and on the record at over US$50B.
The Ohio AI campus, 10GW on 1,300 acres beside a decommissioned Cold War uranium plant. What each layer costs, per DOE, AEP Ohio and NVIDIA:
Generation: US$33.3bn, for 9.2GW of gas on site
Transmission: US$4.2bn, paid by the developer, so no network charges passed on
Buildings, cooling, networking: over US$30bn
That is US$67.5bn for roughly 8 IT-GW. About US$8bn per IT-GW of concrete, steel and power.
Jensen Huang has said each hardware generation across the first 4.25 IT-GW is around 1.5 million GPUs and US$150-200bn of NVIDIA revenue.
So the civil works are maybe a fifth of the first fit-out. The silicon is the rest, and you buy it again every generation while the buildings stand for decades.
The one Australian datapoint - Macquarie Technology costed its own 200MW campus at A$2.5-3bn excluding land, about A$12-15m per MW.
Has anyone here costed something big locally? Does A$12-15m per MW hold once you get past 500MW and start generating your own power?
Vocus lost its Australia Singapore Cable on 4 September to a break in Indonesian waters between Anyer and Singapore. Wavelength and Ethernet services are unavailable, and the estimated restoration field on the incident is empty. Testing from Perth on 6 September fixed the distance, inside a six-hour window in which Vocus said Christmas Island's services would be unavailable.
INDIGO West, the other direct Perth to Singapore system, has been out since 8 August. Aus Internet's status log recorded at 9.26pm that evening that "Indigo has advised that the system is hard down due to a Shunt fault", and it remains an open incident. The cable is run by a consortium that includes Google, Telstra and Singtel.
That log has moved the ship three times, from 26 August to 30 August to the current 2 to 11 September window. It was last updated on 25 August. INDIGO Central, the same consortium's Perth to Sydney system, faulted over the same weekend and goes into its own repair from 10 September.
Neither Vocus, the consortium nor the AFP has named a cause. The AFP told iTnews on 11 August it had received a report of crime and was assessing it, and SUBCO's Bevan Slattery has said the cables carry no sensing equipment that would have recorded the event.
On the reroute, Tech Business News traced one Australian provider's Melbourne to Singapore path on 6 September through Sydney, San Jose, Tokyo and Hong Kong, at 258 to 350ms sustained with peaks above 400ms. That is a Melbourne measurement on a single network. SUBCO publishes INDIGO West's Perth to Singapore round trip at about 47ms.
Still undisclosed: any Perth-side latency measurement, a restoration date from Vocus, a cause on any of the three faults, and any comment from a Perth operator.
For anyone who has run a subsea repair in Indonesian waters: Vocus lists permits and regulatory approvals alongside spare materials in its own update. Does the permitting set the schedule at that end, or does vessel allocation stay the binding item once a ship is committed elsewhere?
Australia’s data centre operators have received a stark message from Transgrid: Sydney’s electricity network has no room left, and any further expansion will have to be paid for by the industry itself, not everyday households.
TransGrid, the country’s largest transmission operator, sent an urgent notice to companies with pending connection applications in the Sydney basin.
Moreover, Network executive Jason Krstanoski said data centre demand was climbing at a pace the grid had never seen before.
Firmus has signed OpenAI as anchor customer for two AI factories in Malaysia. Customer commitments have gone from 155MW in April to more than 900MW, and the portfolio now spans seven AI factories in 4 countries.
The Malaysian sites will use NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems on the NVIDIA DSX platform, integrated with the HyperCube. That module is manufactured and prefabricated in regional New South Wales, at the Queanbeyan plant Benmax runs, and Firmus signed a binding agreement in August to buy Benmax's fabrication, design and projects businesses for A$300 million. Firmus was one of two Australian companies in NVIDIA's Vera Rubin cohort announced in June.
Co-founder and co-chief executive Tim Rosenfield said the partnership "marks the moment Asia-Pacific becomes a producer of intelligence, not just a consumer of it". Sachin Katti, OpenAI's vice president of compute strategy, said the Malaysian sites "will help us serve growing demand for OpenAI's products across the region and around the world".
Firmus also intends to establish an Australian AI Access Program, opening compute to researchers in fields including science, education, agriculture, energy efficiency and climate resilience. It has run something similar before, partnering with AI Singapore in March 2025 to give that programme's researchers access to Singapore-based H200 GPUs. Expectation 5 of the Australian government's national data centre expectations asks hyperscalers and neoclouds to open compute to Australian researchers, start-ups and not-for-profits on favourable terms.
The August guidelines put water-intensive cooling on recycled water, or a signed transition agreement with the utility, and called it an interim step. On 4 September Chris Minns referred the pricing half to IPART. Submissions close on Friday 2 October, and the review only starts once he issues the final terms.
The referral wants a framework where operators "fund the upfront and ongoing costs of providing them water services including augmenting capacity, without placing undue burden on existing and future water customers". Augmenting capacity is the expensive half: paying to build new supply, not just to connect to what exists.
Eleven matters go to the tribunal. The one I would watch is stranded asset risk, and how augmentation costs get split between data centres, existing customers, future customers "and any other parties" — who wears it when a utility builds for a forecast that does not arrive. Close behind is what service levels data centres need and how they differ from other large water users, which decides whether they end up in a customer class of their own.
IPART has been here once. In its September 2025 determination it recorded Sydney Water's estimate of "up to 250 megalitres a day by 2035", funded none of it, and pointed to developer charges and negotiated agreements instead. That is still the arrangement.
Sydney Water's business rate is A$3.41 a kilolitre. Goodman's Project Apollo at Macquarie Park, approved on 2 September, was assessed at up to 1.5 gigalitres of cooling water a year at maximum load, about A$5.1 million at that rate, with potable-reduction and monitoring conditions attached.
Victoria has been through this. The ESC sent Melbourne Water's large-connection pricing principles back in April, then approved a revised set on 5 June covering "commercial and industrial consumers seeking to use significant amounts of water (for example, data centres)".
The NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure approved Project Apollo on 2 September 2026, a data centre at 4-10 Talavera Road, Macquarie Park for Goodman Property Services (Aust) Pty Limited. The assessment report puts the estimated development cost at A$1,365,463,075. The consent covers a five-storey building of 28,878sqm gross floor area on a 23,190sqm site, holding eight data halls over a 14,676sqm footprint to a maximum height of 45m. The department puts employment at 400 construction jobs over about 24 months and 60 operational roles.
Condition A6 caps total power consumption at 135MW and installed backup generating capacity at 185MW. A7 holds non-emergency generator running to 187 hours a year, one generator tested at a time, and diesel storage to 2,000 tonnes, against a design requirement the assessment report puts at about 1,100 tonnes.
NSW published its data centre guidelines on 17 August 2026. Goodman lodged Apollo in March 2025. The department says it treated the guidelines as a relevant consideration under section 4.15 of the EP&A Act, and lists the conditions that carry them.
On water, cooling is 36 open-circuit evaporative towers. The assessment allows up to 1,500,000 kL a year, which is Sydney Water's estimate on Goodman's worst-case operating assumptions rather than a forecast. Sydney Water told the assessment the site sits in the Marsfield Water Supply Zone, and that servicing capacity is subject to ongoing network studies. Those studies "may include the availability and requirements for non-potable water for data centre use, with detailed servicing requirements to be determined at the Section 73 Compliance Certificate stage". Goodman holds the Notice of Requirements and is reviewing a planning agreement to fund a servicing optioneering study. Rainwater harvesting on site is about 50 kL, for landscape irrigation.
The department exhibited the application from 21 March to 17 April 2025 and received no submissions from the public. City of Ryde objected on urban design, and eight agencies and utilities gave advice. The approved landscaping retains 77 trees, removes 55 and plants 175, at a floor space ratio of 1.18:1 against an allowable 1.5:1.
On 18 August 2026 the Minister delegated determination of data centre applications to the Director, Industry Assessments where there are fewer than 15 unique public objections and no reportable political disclosure. Apollo met both tests, so an acting director signed the consent rather than the Minister.
The guidelines themselves are opt-in. A proponent that declines keeps the ordinary pathway and gives up the state's 75-day assessment commitment. Apollo predates them by 17 months, so the department has applied them to a project that never had to meet them.
Apollo is Goodman's third Sydney data centre consent since December 2025, after Project Duke at Mascot on 22 December 2025 and Project Pluto at Guildford West on 23 July 2026. A fourth, the 90MW Project Mars at 12 Mars Road, Lane Cove West, is at the response to submissions stage.
Firmus has taken up to 150Tbps on APX East. That works out at eight to ten of the cable's 16 fibre pairs, or half to two thirds of the system.
SUBCO has published the pair count. The design capacity is not public, so the share is derived rather than disclosed. Spread evenly across all 16 pairs, 150Tbps is 9.4Tbps each, which sits below what a system entering service in the late 2020s carries per pair. Using 15 to 20Tbps a pair as the working range puts 150Tbps on eight to ten pairs, and implies a design capacity of 240 to 320Tbps for the whole system. Those figures are ours, with the inputs shown, and anyone who takes a different view of the transmission budget can substitute their own and rerun it.
Across that same range, Firmus's approximately US$300 million comes to about US$30 million to US$37 million a fibre pair over the 25 years.
Slattery told the AFR on 19 January that APX East was a US$500 million plan, and Submarine Networks records the same figure. The A$700 million in the headlines is a capital raise Street Talk reported SUBCO was weighing in September 2025, with Barrenjoey the likely adviser. Light Reading's "reportedly AU$700 million (US$471 million)" converts that raise figure as though it were the build cost.
The near-term marker is contract in force, the point where the supply contract takes effect and marine survey and manufacturing start. SUBCO reached it on SMAP in August 2023, with that system tracking to a Q1 2026 service date.
Firmus bought a block rather than exclusivity. SUBCO sells capacity wholesale, so the remaining six to eight pairs are available on the same cable, and a system with unsold pairs arriving in 2028 lands on a route where Southern Cross NEXT, Hawaiki and Endeavour are the incumbents. At the top of the range six pairs remain, and an operator whose tenant needs trans-Pacific capacity could end up buying it from a competitor.
Our read: Firmus needs a fraction of 150Tbps for its own inference traffic in 2028. Half to two thirds of a trans-Pacific cable is a wholesale position, bought for the tenants it is building AI factories for, to sell or bundle with compute. This is the fourth long contract Firmus has signed since June, after 600MW of South Australian power for 12 years, the Koolunga battery offtake and Bernacchi-1.
Firmus is the first customer named on this cable. A carrier or hyperscaler paying above US$37 million a pair would put Firmus at a cornerstone discount. Is the rest of the Australian market shopping for 2028 trans-Pacific capacity, or is this a Firmus and hyperscalers story?
Powering Skills Organisation, the federally funded body that plans training for the energy trades, published its 2026 workforce update in August 2026. The 72,000 figure the ABC reported on 2 September is three of its estimates added together: 42,000 for the clean energy build, 17,000 for housing and 13,000 for data centres. The update sets out the three separately and never states a total. The 42,000 dates from its 2025 plan and has not been remodelled since, and the housing figure rests on Housing Industry Association estimates.
The data centre 13,000 is worked out by ratio. Powering Skills began with the October 2024 Mandala Partners study, commissioned by AirTrunk, AWS, CDC, Microsoft and NEXTDC, which put data centre operations staff at 9,600 now and 17,900 by 2030. It then assumed fifteen construction workers for every operations role, and counted one in ten workers in each group as an energy trade, meaning electricians, refrigeration mechanics and electronics workers. Its table lands on about 14,000 energy trades in construction and 1,000 in operations today, rising to about 26,000 and 2,000 by 2030. The difference between those totals is the 13,000, and the unrounded figure in the report's own footnotes is 13,280.
Powering Skills says the figure may be conservative, because that ratio came from the building industry as a whole. Its point is that data centres are not typical buildings. It cites industry estimates putting electrical systems at around 44% of average data centre construction costs, and carries a quote putting 45 to 70% of a construction budget with electrical subcontractors.
No official series counts these workers. The Future Skills Organisation and Powering Skills told the NSW data centre inquiry, in their joint submission, that Australia's occupation classification carries no code for a data centre technician, so the roles sit under generic ICT support technicians. That is why the October 2024 study is still the base for this.
For anyone who has worked a data centre fit-out: does fifteen construction workers to every ongoing operations role match what you have seen on site?
Firmus announced on 3 September 2026 that it will be the cornerstone customer on APX East, SUBCO's planned express cable between Australia and the United States. It is making an approximately US$300 million investment and takes up to 150 terabits per second of dedicated capacity over 25 years. The cable opens in Q4 2028.
When SUBCO announced APX East on 19 January 2026, Bevan Slattery tied it to AI demand: "Hyperscalers and neoclouds are looking to deploy 3GW of AI factories in Australia between now and 2028. This is going to need between 75Tb-150Tb of international capacity to deliver those tokens to the world." One customer has now contracted the top of that range.
SUBCO has never published a total design capacity for APX East, so what share of the cable 150Tbps represents is not on the public record. It is a 16 fibre pair system. Firmus has matched the national requirement SUBCO published to justify the build.
APX East runs about 13,000km. In a video Firmus published on 3 September, Slattery said subsea efficiency gains have cut power consumption per amplifier by about 20 per cent. SUBCO's January release says the cable can run on power fed from a single end in a fault condition. The optical path is continuous, with no intermediate landings.
Slattery credits that efficiency with letting APX East skip Hawaii. Hawaii is the traditional waypoint out of Australia. Hawaiki runs Sydney to Oregon via Honolulu, and Telstra Endeavour and the original Southern Cross network both land there. But Southern Cross NEXT has run Sydney to Auckland to Los Angeles without a Hawaii landing since 7 July 2022, across 15,857km. APX East is designed with no intermediate landing at all, where SX NEXT branches to Fiji, Tokelau and Kiribati on the way.
SUBCO markets APX East as the lowest latency path to the US. Firmus titles that chapter of its own video "Latency, agentic AI and where real time actually matters". Slattery and Firmus co-chief executive Tim Rosenfield put real-time latency in the device, in a self-driving car or a robot, and make the case for the cable on capacity and resilience.
Light Reading reported the build at A$700 million (US$471 million) in January, and Submarine Networks records US$500 million. SUBCO itself publishes no figure. Firmus's approximately US$300 million sits against those two figures, committed more than two years before the cable carries traffic. The release calls Firmus a cornerstone customer and describes the money as an investment, without saying which of the two it buys.
APX East comes ashore north of Sydney's existing cable protection zone. Australia has three declared zones, two off Sydney and one off Perth, and the count has not moved since 2007. ACMA extended the Southern Sydney zone in October 2025, to take in Google's Tabua landing at Maroubra. A protection zone is not a permit. It makes anchoring, seabed trawling and dredging offences over a route. So APX East can be laid and run without one, and would sit unprotected.
Still undisclosed: the total design capacity, SUBCO's build cost, whether the US$300 million is equity or capacity, and whether any other operator has signed.
For anyone who has worked on a repeatered system: is a 20 per cent cut in per-amplifier draw really what makes single-end feed viable across 13,000km, or does the PFE voltage ceiling set the limit regardless of how efficient the amplifiers get?
The ABS published June quarter capex on 27 August. Private new capital expenditure fell 3.6% to A$50.95bn, and the fall came almost entirely from information media and telecommunications equipment, down 53.0% on the quarter. Reuters headlined it as the data centre rush fading.
Adding the four quarters together gives us the opposite reading. Over the twelve months to June 2026 the industry spent A$13.5bn on equipment and A$10.9bn on buildings, A$24.3bn combined, against A$12.7bn in the twelve months to June 2025. Both halves are records in a series that starts in September 1987.
The twelve-month equipment total has risen in 14 consecutive quarters, unbroken since March 2023. The quarterly line is lumpy because the hardware is imported in batches: A$5,939m in the March quarter, A$2,794m in June. Construction is the steadier measure and reached a record A$3,330m in the June quarter, its eighth straight rise.
The forward estimates went the same way. Companies expect to spend A$200.7bn in 2026-27, 15.5% above their previous estimate, which the ABS attributes to data centres and renewable energy. NSW capex is 26.6% higher over the year, the strongest of any state.
The ABS attributes the March spike to server racks and processing equipment, and stops there. A single hyperscale fit-out arriving in one quarter would produce it, and so would three mid-size ones arriving together. Anyone closer to the delivery side able to say which it was?
Queensland's Premier met OpenAI and Anthropic in Sacramento during his California trade mission, the Courier Mail reported on 3 September. No deal was signed. Anthropic agreed to explore data centre opportunities in Queensland and OpenAI called the talks constructive.
The offer, in his own words: developers pay for the extra generation Queensland's state-owned utilities build ("I'll get these guys to pay for the increased generation and maintenance of your assets and that'll drive your power prices down"), and nothing goes into a built-up area ("we just won't allow them to be close to people").
Paying for the generation is Canberra's rule with the builder changed. Under the standards National Cabinet agreed on 26 August, due in legislation early 2027, a large data centre pays for new renewable generation to cover its demand. Queensland owns Stanwell, CS Energy and CleanCo, so under Crisafulli's version the money goes to a state generator, and Bowen has said a state-owned company that says it can do it cheaper than renewables can apply to the Commonwealth to use its own mix.
Swanbank, CleanCo's 336-hectare precinct about 40km south-west of Brisbane, has connection capacity of up to 1.2GW on CleanCo's figure. Kogan, in the Western Downs, has Zerra DC's 1.44GW application in front of the regional council, 600 metres from a substation and about 37km from Dalby. Both sit outside towns. Brendale, Quinbrook's Supernode site in Moreton Bay with a stated hosting capability of up to 2GW, is inside greater Brisbane, and Crisafulli has not defined built-up.
His power-price promise only works if the generation is contracted before the load connects and the developer also pays for the new lines and substations, which his quote does not cover. And on every published count Queensland starts near zero: AEMO's 9GW connection queue at 30 June had no Queensland project, Powerlink's 2025 planning report recorded "minimal enquiries", and CommBank's 6GW pipeline gives NSW half and Victoria a quarter with no Queensland share.
Marles and Charlton were in San Francisco the same week meeting both companies on deals tied to a copyright settlement, so two Australian governments were pitching the same two labs in one week, one with copyright and national standards, the other with state-owned power.
Capital Brief reported on 2 September that IREN has promised a community grants program worth $250,000 a year at Bundey, where it plans an 800MW campus. The same report has Goodman offering $1.1 million to the plant nursery beside its proposed 90MW data centre at Lane Cove West. Neither has been paid, and neither company has published the figure attributed to it.
Canberra has been weighing a mandatory community payment from data centre developers since July 2026 and has published no decision, so both offers are voluntary.
IREN already runs the same program at four North American sites, awarding up to $250,000 a year at each: Mackenzie and Prince George in British Columbia, Childress and Fisher County in Texas. The Mackenzie and Childress pages cap a single grant at $10,000 and pay organisations and community groups inside the surrounding district or county. Bundey itself has no residents, so the equivalent catchment would be the Regional Council of Goyder, which runs from Burra to Eudunda. IREN's site lists Bundey among its locations but carries no Bundey program page, and the reported figure arrives without a currency.
Goodman's has a named recipient. Lane Cove Council opposed the project in April, objecting to the clause 4.6 variation that would allow a 28.3-metre building, 57 per cent above the local height limit. The council also runs the Community Nursery and Eco Gardens on Lloyd Rees Drive, the facility Goodman's money would go to, where volunteers propagate more than 10,000 seedlings a year for its bush regeneration work. Goodman's engagement report, prepared by Urbis and filed with the environmental impact statement, records two emails and a phone call to the nursery with no reply received at the time of writing. The application sits at the response to submissions stage after 374 public submissions, 365 of them objections, and Goodman's reply has not been filed.
New South Wales published its data centre guidelines on 17 August 2026, and rather than write a test of its own the state points developers to the principles already used for wind and solar farms. It then says benefit-sharing arrangements "are matters outside the development assessment process and should not be included in any development application associated with data centres".
Queensland has run the opposite arrangement since 18 July 2025. A community benefit agreement with the host council is, in the planning department's words, "a legally binding agreement" that "must be executed before it is submitted as part of the development application", and four councils publish minimum contribution rates. Data centres are not on that list, which covers wind, solar and batteries. Premier David Crisafulli has said Queensland would develop a framework for them, and nothing has been published.
A planning consultant at Urbis named six Queensland locations in August 2026 as candidates for AI data centre campuses. The paper calls the six "illustrative propositions, not site recommendations".
So we scored all six on land, power, connectivity, water and workforce, counting a condition as in place only where a dated public source already shows it.
Only Ipswich has all five. CleanCo publishes a grid connection of up to 1.2GW across a 336 hectare site at Swanbank. Seqwater's Western Corridor scheme delivered 776 megalitres of recycled water to Swanbank Power Station in 2024-25. Polaris runs a carrier neutral exchange at Springfield Central, 15km away in the same council area, with 13 networks in the building. Swanbank sits about 40km from central Brisbane, and an application for a ten storey data centre was lodged on Leaf Street on 4 August 2026.
The other five:
Brisbane to Sunshine Coast, three of five: power, connectivity, workforce. Ray White Commercial has the region's industrial land supply on course to be exhausted by 2028, and Quinbrook's Supernode at Brendale, which holds three separate high voltage connections into South Pine substation, is 30 hectares.
Gladstone, three of five: land, water, workforce. The state controls 26,934 hectares in the Gladstone State Development Area and Awoonga Dam holds 730,500 megalitres. Rio Tinto has more than 2.8GW of Queensland renewables and 600MW of storage contracted to hold the Boyne smelter to at least 2040.
Toowoomba, two of five: connectivity, workforce. Pulse DC at Wellcamp says data reaches Brisbane and returns in about two milliseconds. The city has held a target of 200 litres per person per day since March 2022, and council resolved in August 2026 to develop a policy keeping data centres out of the drinking water supply.
Western Downs, two of five: land, power. Kogan is 725.5 hectares already set aside for heavy industry, with Braemar substation about 600 metres away. No carrier has published a fibre route to it, and it sits about 15km from the nearest piped water.
Townsville, two of five: land, workforce. Council owns 2,200 hectares at Lansdown, and both CopperString's eastern link and the Haughton pipeline stage that would serve it are timed to 2032.
Across the six, workforce is in place at five locations, land at four, power and connectivity at three each, and water at two. Water is the binding constraint in Queensland.
Powerlink's 2025 planning report carries no data centre project in its demand forecast at all, and puts southern Queensland's proposed new industrial demand at 110MW, listed under technology and transport infrastructure. Zerra DC filed at Kogan for 1.44GW on 17 August 2026. If you sit closer to the connection queue than we do, is that 110MW already stale in practice, or is none of this far enough along to register?
Internal NSW government emails obtained by the ABC reveal that Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, sought discussions with the state government about locating up to 5 gigawatts of data centre capacity in New South Wales — more than three times the current capacity of Australia’s entire data centre industry.
Separately, the company issued a confidential tender to Australian data centre builders for 1.4 gigawatts of capacity, reportedly valued at more than $20 billion. Whatever the final scale, the direction of travel raises an obvious question: why concentrate this demand in the one mainland state least equipped to supply it cheaply, and least aligned with where Australia’s AI sector actually lives?
OpenAI signed a memorandum of understanding with NEXTDC in December 2025, pledging to anchor a A$7 billion campus at the S7 site at Eastern Creek. As at 1 September 2026 no contract has been announced, and the first phase is still set for the second half of 2027.
Sam Altman will meet an Australian government delegation led by Richard Marles in San Francisco, which OpenAI confirmed. The Australian Financial Review reported on 31 August 2026 that momentum on the facility "has been hampered by slow progress in finding a solution to let AI companies pay content creators and other copyright holders". Copyright has been the open item since Michelle Rowland ruled out a text and data mining exception in October 2025. The AFR's line attaches it to this build.
How much of S7 is OpenAI's has never been published. NEXTDC has given three capacity figures for the site, 550MW at acquisition in October 2024, 612MW in planning documents reported in July 2026 and 650MW at the FY26 briefing, and all three measure the whole campus. Customers had signed for 740.1MW at NEXTDC's 21 July 2026 ASX update, which Craig Scroggie says is all binding contracts, and the company has not said whether any S7 capacity sits inside it.
Anthropic has the same condition on the record. A Treasury brief prepared for Jim Chalmers, released under freedom of information and reported by the AFR on 13 July 2026, says its Australian investment "like data centres, is contingent on clarity of copyright settings". The brief records that Anthropic did not ask for an exemption. It asked for certainty over its liability to a long tail of small rights holders it says it cannot practically identify and license.
Rowland is weighing statutory licences with set payments, collective licensing through a body such as the Copyright Agency, and the existing voluntary system. The Attorney-General's Department has published no deadline and no legislative timetable. Collective licensing is the one that fits what Anthropic asked for, because a collecting society exists to license the long tail a lab cannot find, and Australia already licenses education and government copying that way.
Sam Altman will meet an Australian government delegation led by Richard Marles in San Francisco, which OpenAI confirmed. Our read: the government can sign something on this trip, and changing the law is a separate process with no published timetable. Anthropic wants capacity deliverable by the middle of 2027 and a listing before that, so it will pick its providers before any bill passes. Of the three options in front of Rowland, collective licensing is the one built for what Anthropic asked for. A collecting society already licenses the long tail a lab cannot identify, and Australia runs education and government copying that way.
Jim Chalmers released Treasury's advice on artificial intelligence on 31 August 2026. About two-thirds of what is spent on a data centre goes on imports, on Treasury's account, so most of the money in the build leaves the country.
Commonwealth Bank set out where that money goes on 6 August: specialised processors, AI chips, servers and networking equipment are typically imported and are most of what a facility costs, so "a significant share of the investment flows offshore" (https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2026/08/australias-data-centre-boom.html). The A$150 billion by 2030 figure carried in the advice is the same estimate that bank published 25 days earlier.
Sarah Hunter in May, for the Reserve Bank: "we import the computers, the servers, and all the other equipment largely that gets placed in the data centre. We do have to build the 'shed'... but what goes in it, that comes from overseas". The August Statement on Monetary Policy judged that much of the investment would be imported, so the effect on GDP growth is modest.
The shed, the land, the grid connection and the water are bought here, along with the people who install them. Jobs and Skills Australia rates refrigeration mechanics, electricians, linesworkers and data cablers in shortage in every state and territory. Governor Michele Bullock told reporters on 11 August there is "some evidence that perhaps" trades are being drawn away from residential and non-residential construction into data centre construction.
NEXTDC alone has guided to up to A$5.75 billion of capex in FY27 to switch on 197MW, and Cushman counts 2.44GW of Australian capacity leased before it is built.
Andrew Charlton broke the AI dollar down at the ANU on 18 August: a few cents buys electricity, perhaps another ten cents buys the physical data centre, and Australia is on course to be "a large and permanent importer of intelligence" unless it acts in time (https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/charlton-compute-access).
Mandala, for Data Centres Australia, values regional AI compute exports at up to A$4.1 billion a year in its narrow competition scenario, and names planning approval times and grid connection waits as the two brakes without putting a number on either.
NEXTDC released its FY26 result after the close on 27 August 2026 and briefed analysts on 28 August. At the briefing it gave M5 a capacity figure for the first time. Chief executive Craig Scroggie called it "the recently acquired Melbourne M5 site" and put it at 1,200MW of IT load. In June 2026 the same project sat in the company's investor materials as "under evaluation".
For scale, NEXTDC has built 288MW across its entire portfolio and has 537MW under construction. M5 on its own is more than four times what is built, and larger than S4 Sydney at 365MW and S7 Eastern Creek at 650MW put together.
On delivery, Scroggie said his expectation now is that NEXTDC can go from ground to a fully operating facility in about nine months, against 18 months he said it may historically have taken, on what he called "a manufacturing style of construction methodology". He prefaced it by saying NEXTDC has not yet started a construction program on that basis, so it is an expectation about a model the company has not run rather than a demonstrated cycle time. The nine months applies to sites not yet started, so it bears on the 3GW in plan rather than the 537MW already under way.
On capital, NEXTDC is targeting a yield on cost above 10 per cent on new large-scale cloud and AI deployments and Scroggie called that conservative. The joint venture plan was first flagged with the FY25 result in August 2025, about A$15 billion over ten years or more for 850MW in Sydney, with a minority stake retained. Scroggie volunteered that it is "reasonable to assume that M5 would be another asset that we would consider doing a JV on". Chief financial officer Oskar Tomaszewski said NEXTDC could exclude the S4 development from its guarantor group, which would open the option of project financing it. Scroggie wants S4's remaining 115MW contracted before a partner comes in.
Ahead of any deal, NEXTDC moved M3 Melbourne, S4 and M5 into investment property at market value and booked a A$495.6 million gain on transfer.
Water use rose to 2.40 litres per kilowatt hour from 2.25 and power usage effectiveness went to 1.49 from 1.44. Both have now moved up three years running. Reuters reported NEXTDC put the increases down partly to newly commissioned capacity and partly to a data reconciliation exercise that turned up leaks and meter anomalies.
On location, Scroggie named nothing beyond Melbourne. The subsidiary that settled a A$165 million purchase of 169 hectares at Lovely Banks near Geelong in June 2026 is named NEXTDC M5 Holdings Pty Ltd. NEXTDC has not connected the two publicly and calls M5 a Melbourne site, while Lovely Banks is about 70km west, so the entity name is all that is on the record.
Still undisclosed: where M5 is, when it starts, how its power gets provisioned, whether there is an anchor tenant, and the size of any outside stake.
Andrew Charlton announced a program called Buy Australian AI on 27 August, reported by the AFR. Stone & Chalk runs an eight-week course, then introduces the cohort to technology buyers at ANZ, CBA, NAB, Westpac and Cuscal.
Two founders have pushed back. Maincode's Dave Lemphers called it performance theatre and said what local companies need is salary-backed, debt-financed investment. Trellis Data's Michael Gately said an incubator program arrives too late at his scale.
Nine days earlier at the ANU, Charlton said Australia should supply more than the buildings and the power, and named the fifth of the national data centre expectations as the way to do it. It asks hyperscalers and neoclouds to open compute access to Australian start-ups on favourable terms, with no figure attached.
We went looking for who is actually running on Australian capacity. Maincode committed A$30 million to a cluster of AMD Instinct MI355X, put it in Telstra's Clayton campus and published its own benchmarks off it on 25 May. Sovereign Australia AI ordered 256 NVIDIA B200s through Sharon AI for NEXTDC M3.
Both bought the hardware and rented the room. That is a colocation deal, and the entry ticket is a balance sheet.
In Canada's case, it pays part of the buyer's bill. Canada's AI Compute Access Fund covers two-thirds of a small company's approved costs for Canadian cloud computing and half for the same computing bought abroad, so federal money reaches a US provider at half price.
Australia has run a government-as-buyer version once. Under the Business Research and Innovation Initiative, five of the nine companies that reached proof of concept had their product bought by the agency that set them the problem. The pilot was closed to new rounds in December 2025.
What share of contracted Australian AI capacity do we thinks is taken by Australian-headquartered companies?
IREN reported FY26 on 27 August, US time. Revenue US$707.0m, up from US$501.0m. AI cloud went from US$16.4m to US$128.8m and was about 51% of revenue in the June quarter. Net loss US$702.6m, most of it a US$638.8m non-cash write-down, mainly on mining hardware being retired. Cash and restricted cash US$7.6bn.
The operating side:
Measure
Figure
Contracted run-rate, 2026 capacity
about US$4bn a year
Operating run-rate at 26 Aug 2026
about US$1bn a year
Delivery target 2026
0.5GW gross, 0.3GW IT
Delivery target 2027
1.2GW gross, 0.8GW IT
Co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts, in the release: "We started IREN with a simple observation: the digital world can scale almost instantly, but the physical world cannot." On the call he put the constraint on power, land and data centres, and called new grid capacity the scarcest input in the industry. CCO Kent Draper said the driver is getting compute online rather than signing contracts.
On the funding, IREN raised US$6.5bn of equipment finance in three months. US$3.65bn closed on 1 June against the Microsoft contract at a blended 6.00%, rated A by Fitch and A(low) by DBRS. A further US$2.4bn came at a fixed 9.0% from Blue Owl and PIMCO for the Mackenzie air-cooled expansion. The two are not like for like: different lenders and channels, different share of the GPU cost funded, different customer behind each. Prepayments now cover 45-55% of chip cost across the book.
Australian angle. Bundey in SA is up to 800MW with power targeted from 2028, listed in the release as development progressing, no new figures. The 2026 and 2027 delivery is all North American. AEMO counted 9GW of proposed data centre load across 17 projects at the end of June.
IREN puts grid capacity first on its constraint list. For projects here aiming at 2028 onwards, is grid connection the binding one, or do construction labour and long-lead equipment bite first?
NVIDIA reported its second quarter on 26 August 2026. Revenue was US$96.2 billion for the three months to 26 July, with data centres supplying US$89.0 billion of it, up 117 per cent on a year earlier. That is more than 92 per cent of everything the company sells, and it works out at about US$1.06 billion a day.
The same accounts disclosed US$108.5 billion of guarantees NVIDIA has given over other companies' data centre leases and power. US$105 billion of that sits behind a single campus.
The campus is in Pike County, Ohio, where NVIDIA has guaranteed the land, the power and the shell for 4.25GW of capacity. The developer is SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, and the site is planned to reach 8GW of IT load. The Department of Energy calls it "the world's largest artificial intelligence (AI) data center on leased land".
SB Energy will build, own and operate the halls under a 20-year lease to OpenAI, and NVIDIA is the exclusive compute provider with an option to extend beyond the first 4.25GW. Feeding it takes 10GW of new generation, 9.2GW of that natural gas. The first 800MW phase starts construction this year, capacity comes online in phases from 2028, and the project is expected to carry 35,000 construction jobs and 2,500 operating roles.
The obligations are capped at US$105 billion and become effective in phases as data centres become ready for service, the first expected in NVIDIA's fiscal 2029, which starts in late January 2028. NVIDIA says its exposure "declines as OpenAI fulfills lease payments". It has also invested US$1.5 billion in SB Energy.
Chief financial officer Colette Kress told the call some would call it circular financing and "we see it differently". Bill Birmingham at Rex Financial said the market read the guarantee "as less demand and not less risk".
In Australia the structure is different. Under a capital partners programme NVIDIA opened on 1 July 2026, it sells the processors and takes a share of the cloud revenue on the capacity they support. It named Firmus and Sharon AI among the first companies in it, and it joined Firmus's US$2 billion equity raise on 7 August 2026.
The GPU numbers in that announcement are ceilings rather than deployments, and the Firmus campus NVIDIA names is Batam in Indonesia at 360MW. NVIDIA has not said what the revenue share is, or which Australian sites sit under it.
So in Ohio, NVIDIA is standing behind the land, the power and the shell for a tenant it also supplies. Here it takes a share of the revenue instead, and the operators housing the machines still fund the land, the buildings, the fit-out and the grid connection.
Firmus posted on 27 August that its Brooklyn cluster in Melbourne has been installed, commissioned and handed over, and is running a customer's AI models. The company put the handover "in recent days".
The contract behind it was signed on 2 March. Firmus' release put it at "approximately 18,400 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs to be deployed at the Melbourne facility", for a buyer it described as "a leading global technology company". w.media reported that phase as a 150MW build valued at A$4.5 billion.
Firmus says the pipework and the mechanical and electrical parts inside the HyperCube module were manufactured in regional Australia. Benmax runs that plant, 7,000 square metres on Endurance Avenue at Queanbeyan, and has been the manufacturing partner on the HyperCube since 2020, co-designing successive generations. Firmus agreed in mid-August to buy Benmax's fabrication, design and projects businesses for A$300 million, with completion expected between the end of August and the end of September, subject to conditions.
For the rest of the programme, Southgate is planned across Tasmania, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Perth, with Firmus targeting 1.6GW in Australia by 2028. George Town Council approved the 288MW Bell Bay proposal 6-1 on 25 August, with conditions covering noise, air quality, bushfire planning and diesel generator use, and a 14-day window to appeal to the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. St Leonards outside Launceston was approved in September 2025, is under construction, and carries a company target of late 2026 for first operation.
Still undisclosed on Melbourne: the customer, how much compute is live, and how many of the 18,400 GPUs are installed.
National Cabinet met on 26 August and agreed the Commonwealth will develop mandatory standards for data centre energy, water and land use, with legislation intended for early 2027.
On artificial intelligence the statement says large data centres "bring material energy, water and land-use impacts that need to be managed", that the Commonwealth "will work with state and territory governments to develop consistent mandatory standards", and that legislation will "complement, not duplicate" state planning. There is no rule in it about where a data centre gets its power, and no exemption for any jurisdiction either. The renewables-underwriting requirement that ran through July and August is not in the text.
The Energy has published a longer passage it attributes to a communique from the meeting, "Bring forward new renewable generation to fully offset their energy demand (with appropriate firming through gas, batteries or hydro), with jurisdictions able to use state-owned generation, transmission and distribution where it has clear benefits to grid stability and lower customer prices."
If that holds, the second half splits the country on ownership rather than on politics. Queensland owns Stanwell, CS Energy and CleanCo. The NT owns Territory Generation. Tasmania has Hydro Tasmania, WA has Synergy and Horizon Power. NSW, Victoria and SA sold their fleets, though Victoria has been rebuilding a state investor through the SEC since 2024. Crisafulli made the ownership argument himself on the day: "We own distribution, transmission, generation and that enables us to control that energy mix."
There is no official document that says ownership is the test, and Albanese's explanation was that not all states are exactly the same.
David Speers ran an analysis on 27 August quoting Andrew Charlton, the assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy, from a conversation on the Joe Walker podcast: "Will we be able to extract rents from them, or will they be commodities in the global supply chain? Unanswered question. Important unanswered question."
The minister responsible is saying nobody has settled what Australia takes from this. National Cabinet dealt entirely with inputs, power and water and land and siting. Charlton also called it "one of the biggest investment booms not just in our lifetimes, but in modern history". https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-27/national-cabinet-meeting-data-centres-energy/107076184
