The company behind the AI chatbot Claude has been quietly shopping for enormous amounts of computing capacity in Australia, according to emails obtained by the ABC.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that Anthropic, the US artificial intelligence firm, sought a meeting with the New South Wales government earlier this year to discuss locating up to five gigawatts of data centres in the state. The ABC describes the plans, revealed in the emails, as "massive."
To put five gigawatts in perspective without reaching beyond what the reporting establishes: gigawatt-scale is the language of national power infrastructure, not of individual buildings. Data centres are, at bottom, warehouses of computer chips that need continuous electricity to run and more electricity still to stay cool. Capacity on this scale is a request on the electricity grid as much as it is a real estate proposal — which is why a conversation like this one goes to a state government rather than only to a landlord.
The ABC's account describes an approach and a desired meeting, not a signed deal, a chosen site, or a confirmed investment. What the emails document is intent: that Anthropic was actively looking at NSW as a place to put a very large amount of AI computing power.
The broader context is a global race among AI developers to secure the physical capacity their models require. Training and running systems like Claude depends on hardware that has to sit somewhere, drawing power from someone's grid.
It matters because decisions being made in private correspondence between AI companies and governments will shape where electricity, water, and land go in the coming years — and the public usually finds out, as here, only when the emails surface.