It's set to be the largest data centre project in Australia, but the Western Downs Digital Park (WDDP) has left many Australians with unanswered questions.
Artificial intelligence behemoth Anthropic has signed a long-term lease to run its Claude AI system out of the yet-to-be-built data centre in Queensland's Western Downs.
Zerra DC, a developer based in Singapore, has forked out $30 billion to build the data centre, and it is expected to take four to six years to build the facility.
Despite that, Anthropic plans to start using Building One at the centre in 2027.
It's important to note that Anthropic's lease is subject to Foreign Investment Review Board approval.
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli says this data centre investment will drive down energy costs for consumers and bring jobs to the community.
But as Queensland opens the door to artificial intelligence, here's some things you should know about the proposed centre in Western Downs.
Where is the Western Downs data centre?
The site will be located on Dalby Kogan Road in the western Queensland suburb of Kogan.
The 725.5-hectare plot is 37km north-west of Dalby and approximately 250 kilometres north-west of Brisbane.
How much water is it going to use?
The developers claim the data centre will be 100 per cent air cooled. That would, in theory, result in far less water consumption than other data centres.
Zerra DC said the first building, or Phase 1 of the project, will require 21,000 litres of water a day once fully operational.
Per year, that amounts to 7.7 million litres of water required for the first building.
"That's nothing," Ian Wright, associate professor in environment science at Western Sydney University said.
"That's absolutely tiny."
He said that would be similar to the water consumption of a small shopping mall.
"I would say that was a fraction of what I was expecting. I expected it would need more like 21,000 litres in a matter of minutes."
For the entire campus of four buildings, Zerra DC estimates a total of 25.5 million litres of water would be required per year once fully operational.
Zerra DC says the data centre will also meet 40 per cent of its daily water demands through "on-site water recycling" which it claims will bring the actual outside water requirement down to around 13,000 litres a day.
It says that will be met by rainwater harvesting and the facility will not use groundwater for operations.
However, it will be able to draw on groundwater as a last-resort contingency, according to the developer.
How does air cooling help?
The air-cooling set-up for this facility will use a heat-rejection system that uses closed-loop water circulation within the data centre, but heat is rejected to the outside air rather than through evaporation.
Mr Wright said if the system works, it would be "brilliant", but he had concerns.
"That would be a game changer and that goes against my knowledge of what happens around the world," he said.
"I suppose there's a dubious edge to my voice here — it just sounds too good to be true."
This system has been successfully used in other data centres, however usually on a much smaller scale as they have been known to struggle with high-density server racks, which are common in AI workloads.
"It looks like they've done their homework," Mr Wright said.
"It could be pretty much water neutral. I reckon the world will be watching to see if you could build something this big air cooled."
What are the ongoing jobs at a data centre?
According to Zerra DC, the data centre is expected to provide around 1,400 jobs directly at the facility once fully operational.
It says those ongoing roles will lie in mechanical, electrical, controls, security and ICT information, as well as communications technology which covers computing, telecommunications, networks, software and related digital systems.
A report from the UK government found that while data centres require a lot of staff to build, the number of daily jobs created for operations is "relatively modest" and is likely only ever a few hundred.
The Virginia state government in the US found that a 23,226 square metres (sqm) data centre "may have approximately 50 full-time workers".
The facility in Western Downs will utilise approximately 195,000sqm of total floor space once fully built and the sheer size is one reason for the greater need for staff, the developers said.
While the facility is being built, the developer says a further 1,500 on-site construction workers will be required, with indirect jobs also expected to arise both during construction and ongoing at the facility.
What about power concerns?
In the proposal for the development, Zerra DC said the digital park will "connect directly to the high-voltage transmission network at the existing Braemar substation".
The infrastructure required for the connection and the connection process itself would be provided and organised by the tenants of each building, Zerra DC said.
For Building One, that is Anthropic. The AI giant plans to go to market for long-term power purchase agreements with renewable energy suppliers.
The data centre would have a peak electrical capacity of 2.16 GW.
Electro-mechanical engineer Dr Andreas Helwig said that is extremely large by Australian standards.
"If fully built out and operating at typical hyperscale utilisation, it would draw around 43–47 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy per day," he said.
He added that is roughly 25–30 per cent of Queensland’s entire average daily electricity consumption.
According to Energex, the entire network for south-east Queensland delivers roughly 61 GWh per day across the entire regional grid.
Dr Helwig said that households in the local area near the site should not be impacted, but the facility will pointed to the size of the continuous load once more.
The GWh capacity of 2.16 is equivalent to "more than three Darling Downs gas stations running at full output", Dr Helwig said.
