If there’s an AI gold rush happening in Australia, we shouldn’t waste it. Let’s take a different path | Peter Lewis

TThe CEOs of AI titans Microsoft and Anthropic have made Canberra a duke. The reason? They’ve bet that we’re at the start of an AI gold rush, and they have a big problem: finding safe places to train their massive models.

With U.S. public tolerance for data centers and the staggering energy and water they consume exhausted, these companies need stable foundations to advance these mega data projects and advance their technology. This requires access to space, renewable energy and a stable political environment – resources that are in short supply worldwide.

Assuming you’re willing to bet that AI is neither an unsustainable bubble nor a fast track to societal collapse and global annihilation (and to be clear, I’m in both camps), then there seems to be a real pitch for Australia to produce artificial intelligence the way the Middle East produces oil.

It’s not just the data centers springing up around the suburbs to provide power…