The short version
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli, on a trade mission to the United States, announced on 16 September 2026 that Anthropic — the San Francisco company behind the Claude models — had signed a long-term lease to use part of the Western Downs Digital Park, a proposed data centre campus near Dalby on Queensland’s Western Downs. The developer is Zerra DC, a Singapore-based company. The Premier put the project at $32 billion; the town planning report behind the development application says $31.9 billion of private investment; several outlets round it to $30 billion.
Anthropic intends to start using Building One in 2027. The campus as a whole is a four-to-six-year build. The workload, according to every report we found, is inference — running Claude to answer requests from users — not training new models.
What makes this different from the AWS, Microsoft and Google announcements of the past 18 months is scale and location. Those were tens of billions spread across metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne. This is one site, in cattle country, designed for 1.44 gigawatts of IT capacity and a total facility demand of 2.16 gigavolt-amperes, which the ABC describes as roughly the electricity of 1.5 million average Australian households. Trade press notes it is about 4.5 times the announced capacity of AirTrunk’s SYD3 campus, currently one of the largest in the country.
And it has not been approved by anyone. The development application went to Western Downs Regional Council on 17 August 2026. Anthropic’s lease itself is conditional on the Foreign Investment Review Board.
What is actually in the application
The most useful document is not the press release but the development application, as summarised by the Brisbane Development site from the Urbis town planning report. The figures below are from that summary unless marked otherwise.
| Site | 1933 Dalby-Kogan Road, Kogan QLD 4406 — 725.5 hectares, currently the Wambo Feedlot, approved for 24,000 head of cattle. Rural zone, inside the Kogan East Special Industry Area. About 37 km north-west of Dalby and roughly 250 km north-west of Brisbane. |
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| Buildings | Four single-storey data halls delivered in four stages (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B). Each hall has 36,000 m² of data floor inside 41,897 m² of gross floor area; 167,588 m² in total. Roof ridge at 13.23 m, with 9.2 m facades of non-reflective stainless steel. The ABC explainer puts total floor space at approximately 195,000 m², a different measure. |
| Power | 360 MW per hall, 1.44 GW of IT capacity across the four, and a total facility demand of 2.16 GVA. Two customer-owned switching stations at 275 kV and 330 kV, with three 540 MVA transformers per stage stepping down to 33 kV, plus battery storage described as presenting a stable load to the grid. |
| Grid connection | Direct to the high-voltage transmission network at the existing Braemar substation — a transmission-connected large load, not a draw on the local Ergon distribution network. Each building’s tenant provides its own connection; for Building One that is Anthropic, which the ABC reports is covering the full cost of the connection and the required network upgrades. The state’s position is that no new transmission infrastructure is required. |
| Water and cooling | Described as primarily air-cooled with closed-loop liquid cooling: about 16.5 kilolitres a day in operation, about 522 kilolitres a day during construction, and a one-off system fill of 26.9 megalitres per hall. Supply from road tankers, recycled water, an existing dam, rainwater harvesting and treated wastewater. |
| Jobs | About 1,500 direct construction positions and about 1,400 permanent direct on-site jobs, with an estimated $760 million a year in gross value added to the Queensland economy. The Premier’s announcement, as reported by the ABC, said “around 1,000 jobs”. |
| Status | Lodged 17 August 2026. Impact assessable, meaning it is open to public submissions, and referred to the State Assessment and Referral Agency and Powerlink. Announced 16 September. Not yet approved by council, and Anthropic’s lease still needs FIRB clearance. |
How much power is 2.16 gigawatts, really?
The ABC’s explainer of 18 September did the conversion that the press release did not. At typical hyperscale utilisation the campus would draw 43 to 47 gigawatt-hours a day, which it puts at 25 to 30 per cent of Queensland’s average daily electricity consumption. For scale, it notes that South-East Queensland’s entire distribution network delivers roughly 61 GWh a day. Dr Andreas Helwig, quoted by the ABC, described the capacity as equivalent to “more than three Darling Downs gas stations running at full output”. Tech Times, working from a state average of about 170 GWh a day, lands at around 28 per cent.
Our own arithmetic, flagged as such: 47 GWh a day is roughly 17 TWh a year. When we wrote about the AEMC’s data centre framework in August, the reference point was AEMO’s 2026 Integrated System Plan, which projected all Australian data centres together reaching 34 TWh a year by 2050. If this one campus ran at the utilisation the ABC assumes, it would be half of that national 2050 figure on its own. Either the forecast is about to move, or this facility will not run at that level, or both. It is the single clearest sign that the national numbers are already stale.
The capacity figures also drift between reports, and it pays to know which one you are reading. 1.44 GW is the IT load in the application. 2.16 GVA is the total facility demand, including cooling and losses. Several outlets quote “2.16 GW of peak capacity” and the ABC uses 1.5 million households; The Nightly uses 1.6 million homes for the same number. They are describing the same building from different angles.
The coal question
This is where the argument is. The Braemar substation that the campus taps is, according to Tech Times, connected to three state-owned coal-fired power stations. The Queensland government has, per the same report, negotiated what it calls a “technology-agnostic approach” for data centres, allowing coal and gas alongside renewables, within a national cabinet arrangement under which states that own generation and transmission assets can put a case to the Australian Energy Regulator that using coal or gas will lower consumer prices compared with renewables. The ABC characterises the state’s position as coal and gas, with a live disagreement with the federal government over renewable requirements.
Anthropic’s stated plan, per the ABC, is to pursue long-term power purchase agreements with renewable energy suppliers. That is the standard hyperscaler answer and it is not nothing — but as we noted in August, the AEMC’s draft framework turns on whether such agreements bring new, additional generation to the grid or simply relabel existing clean electrons. None of the reporting we found says which kind these would be, because the agreements do not exist yet.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, quoted by The Nightly, said his government welcomes data centres on condition that they bring sufficient electricity and water to cover their own operations. Premier Crisafulli’s framing, as reported by the ABC, was that the project “will deliver more jobs, put more energy into Queensland’s grid and drive down power prices for Queenslanders” — the mechanism for the last claim being the connection and network upgrades Anthropic pays for, which then serve everyone. The Climate Council’s chief executive Amanda McKenzie, in Tech Times, argued the opposite: that the facility “could use three times more power than 1.4 million Brisbane residents, pushing up expensive and harmful coal and gas generation”, that its demand could lift wholesale prices by more than 10 per cent, and that the emissions would be “like putting more than 2 million extra cars on the roads”.
Both of those things can be partly true. A large flat load that pays for its own connection does spread network costs across more kilowatt-hours, which is the industry’s cost-down argument. A large flat load that runs through the evening peak on coal and gas does lift the wholesale price everyone pays. Which effect wins depends on the power purchase agreements Anthropic has not yet signed, and on rules the AEMC has not yet finalised.
The water claim, and the expert who half-believes it
The developer’s position is that the campus is 100 per cent air-cooled: heat is moved by a closed water loop inside the building and rejected to the outside air, rather than evaporated away. The application’s operational demand of 16.5 kilolitres a day is, for a building of this size, remarkably small. The ABC explainer quotes slightly different figures for Building One — 21,000 litres a day, 7.7 million litres a year, and 25.5 million litres a year for the full four-hall campus — with 40 per cent of daily demand met by on-site recycling, rainwater harvesting as the primary source, and groundwater available only as a last-resort contingency.
Ian Wright of Western Sydney University, quoted by the ABC, called the water need “absolutely tiny” and comparable to a small shopping mall, and said “it looks like they’ve done their homework” and it “could be pretty much water neutral”. He was also openly sceptical that full air cooling works at this scale with the high-density racks AI workloads use: “That would be a game changer and that goes against my knowledge of what happens around the world.” That is the most honest summary of the water position available: the numbers are good, and the technique that produces them is unproven at this size.
Save Our Darling Downs spokesperson Liza Balmain, per the ABC, raised a different water issue — not the data centre’s own consumption but the effect of gas-fired generation on the region’s aquifers if that is what ends up powering it.
Jobs: 1,000, 1,400 or 50?
The application says about 1,500 construction workers and about 1,400 ongoing direct on-site positions, in mechanical, electrical, controls, security and ICT roles. The Premier said around 1,000. The ABC explainer adds two pieces of context worth keeping beside those numbers: UK government research finding that data centre operations create “relatively modest” ongoing employment, and a Virginia study in which a 23,226 m² facility supported roughly 50 full-time workers. A 167,588 m² campus on that ratio would be a few hundred jobs, not 1,400. The application’s figure may well be right — a campus this size has its own substations and battery plant to run — but it is the developer’s number and nobody has audited it.
Why Anthropic did not just use AWS
Anthropic’s existing capacity in Australia, like most AI companies’, sits inside hyperscale clouds. Capacity magazine’s reading of this deal is that the largest AI buyers are shifting toward direct control of critical capacity rather than leasing it wholesale from a single cloud provider, much as hyperscalers moved from renting subsea cable capacity to owning cables. Leasing a whole building from a developer, with your own grid connection, is that strategy applied to a data hall. Capacity found no statement from Anthropic itself explaining the choice, and neither did we — every quote in the coverage is from the Premier, the developer’s planning consultants, or critics.
Who is against it
| The local federal MP | David Littleproud, the federal member for Maranoa, told the ABC: “Power reliability and cost for existing homes, farmers and businesses cannot be sacrificed to get this project across the line.” Not opposition, exactly, but a marker. |
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| Residents | Save Our Darling Downs has raised the energy consumption and gas-generation questions above. The Nightly reports a petition against the project reached 1,340 signatures within two weeks. |
| The Climate Council | The wholesale price and emissions arguments quoted above. Its June 2026 Clouded future modelling, which we covered in August, found data centre demand met by gas could lift NSW wholesale prices by 26 per cent by 2035; this is the same argument applied to one site. |
| The Greens | The Nightly’s headline says the Greens “slammed” the plan, but the article body we could access carried no named Greens speaker or quote. We are noting the headline and not the claim. |
| Approvers | Western Downs Regional Council (development approval, with SARA and Powerlink as referral agencies) and the Foreign Investment Review Board (Anthropic’s lease). Neither had decided anything as of 22 September 2026. |
What this means for you
| Your Claude requests will not move in 2027 | Anthropic says Building One starts in 2027 and the workload is inference. Where a given request is served depends on routing decisions Anthropic has not described. Do not expect a visible change, and treat any claim about “Australian data sovereignty” as unconfirmed until Anthropic says it. |
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| Nothing changes on your power bill yet | The campus does not exist. Every price effect quoted above is a projection from one side or the other. As with the August framework, the question that decides it is whether the power purchase agreements bring new generation — and they have not been signed. |
| If you live on the Western Downs | The application is impact assessable, which means Western Downs Regional Council must accept public submissions. That is the process that reaches a decision-maker; a petition does not. The water, traffic, noise and land-use questions are decided there, not in the electricity rules. |
| The number to remember | 1.44 GW of IT load. When the next announcement says “gigawatts”, ask whether it means IT capacity or total facility demand, because the two differ here by about 50 per cent. |
| The pipeline is bigger than this | Westpac analysis published 15 September, cited by The Nightly, values Australia’s data centre pipeline at $175 billion. In August we quoted trade press at $150 billion. This project alone is a fifth of the new figure. |
The bottom line
This is the biggest single data centre proposal Australia has seen, with the most consequential tenant, and it is at the earliest possible stage: an application on a council’s desk, a lease waiting on FIRB, and power agreements that do not exist. The water story is unusually good on paper and unproven at scale. The jobs story is the developer’s. The power story is the whole story, and it will be decided by which generators end up on the other end of the Braemar substation — a question that neither the Premier’s press release nor the Climate Council’s response can settle, because the contracts that answer it have not been written.
Anthropic, for its part, has said almost nothing publicly. Given that the arguments for and against are being made entirely by other people, that is the gap we would most like to see filled.
Sources
- ABC News — AI giant Anthropic signs agreement for $32b Queensland data centre (16 September 2026): the Premier’s announcement from the US trade mission, Zerra DC, the 725-hectare site near Dalby, the 1.5 million household comparison, the coal and gas position, the water comparison to an office building, no new transmission required, Anthropic covering connection and network costs, inference not training, the “around 1,000 jobs” figure, FIRB and council approvals, and the Crisafulli, Littleproud and Balmain quotes.
- ABC News — Anthropic is set to run Claude out of a Queensland data centre, here’s what you need to know (18 September 2026): the 2.16 GW peak figure, 43 to 47 GWh a day and 25 to 30 per cent of Queensland consumption, the 61 GWh South-East Queensland comparison, the Helwig quote, the renewable PPA plan, Building One water figures and the full-campus 25.5 ML a year, 100 per cent air cooling and 40 per cent recycling, the Ian Wright quotes, the 1,400 ongoing and 1,500 construction jobs, the UK and Virginia employment context, and the Braemar connection.
- Brisbane Development — Anthropic joins $32 billion Western Downs Digital Park west of Brisbane (September 2026): the development application lodged 17 August 2026, impact assessable status and referral to SARA and Powerlink, the Kogan address and Wambo Feedlot, four halls of 36,000 m² data floor and 167,588 m² GFA, 360 MW per hall and 1.44 GW IT capacity, 2.16 GVA facility demand, the 275 kV and 330 kV switching stations, the 16.5 kL operational and 522 kL construction water figures, $31.9 billion private investment, $760 million annual GVA, and the Urbis planning report.
- Tech Times — Anthropic signs Australia’s largest data center deal, locked into coal power for years (17 September 2026): the three state-owned coal stations at Braemar, the transmission-connected large load, the 540 MVA stage 1 substation, the 47 GWh a day and roughly 28 per cent figures, the AirTrunk SYD3 comparison, Queensland’s technology-agnostic arrangement and the national cabinet and AER mechanism, and the Amanda McKenzie quotes.
- Capacity — Why Anthropic went straight to a developer for its first Australian data centre (16 September 2026): the direct-lease strategy argument, the subsea cable analogy, 1.44 GW IT and 2.16 GW peak, and the absence of any Anthropic statement.
- The Nightly — US AI pioneer Anthropic plans to use giant Queensland data centre for Claude (September 2026): the Prime Minister’s electricity and water condition, the 1.6 million homes comparison, the 1,340-signature petition, and the Westpac $175 billion pipeline figure of 15 September 2026.
- Converge Digest — Anthropic signs first Australian data center deal in Queensland and TechRepublic — Anthropic goes big in Australia: 2.16 GW data center will power Claude (September 2026): the staged 2027 start, the inference workload, the four-to-six-year build and the FIRB condition.
- New Technology — AI data centres and your power bill (13 August 2026): our earlier snapshot of the AEMC framework, the AEMO 2026 ISP forecasts, the Climate Council modelling and the additionality question referred to above.