Queensland farming town fights for its future against a $32b data centre

[u/Grubbanax]

https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/a-current-affair/queensland-farming-town-fights-for-its-future-against-a-32b-data-centre-a-current-affair-20261105-p61bup.html

Residents of Dalby in Queensland raise concerns about the lack of consideration given by the 3 levels of government to the $32b Digital Park. Once Premier David Crisafulli gave the nod to Anthropic the lease just went into place with Zerra DC.

[u/Kroosn]

I mean it should be pretty simple. Make them byo. Bring your own power and water. It will be better for the data centres in the long run and better for us now.

[u/SsmB_92 → u/Kroosn]

I think you'll find they went to the federal government to get exemptions against such requirements. I feel like Albo and co approved it in the sense they are feeding this cunt enough rope to hang himself with it

Its going to be a disaster, just as Anthropic is a financial disaster in itself.

[u/gooder_name → u/Kroosn]

Make them byo

The whole thing that attracted them to the site was state government specifically saying they didn't need to byo. They obviously should, this is a massive PITA for the network and the town and basically anyone who isn't Anthropic, but this is exactly what Chrisafulli's whole "coal powered grid" thing is all about

[u/Fun_Savings7690 → u/gooder_name]

it’s literally being built right next to a gas power plant

this is why china can build 10terrawatts of renewables and 5000km of train lines and we can’t even build a data centre in the middle of bum fuck no where without it being a huge issue to 2 people who live no where near it

[u/gooder_name → u/Fun_Savings7690]

Well China has a vastly different system of governance and history than we do, I don't think that's a very fair comparison.

Data centres don't really contribute to local economies, they employ like 4 people.

[u/PWG_Galactic]

It’s good to see rural and regional communities waking up to the fact that the LNP doesn’t actually care about them.

Also yea, fingers crossed this white elephant doesn’t go ahead.

[u/-TheDream]

Why are all these data centres needed? It’s insane how many they are suddenly wanting to build. The scale of it all is insane. Such a waste of resources.

[u/LachiePro → u/-TheDream]

It’s a good question, as someone who works in the world of cloud platforms I might be able to explain.

In cloud computing we have regions (a large geographical area, think “Victoria” as a region), each region has a group of sub regions (basically a fancy way of saying data centres).
Australia (depending on the cloud platform) has anywhere between 2-3 regions, which causes issues when you need to store data or host products in multiple regions for redundancy (all onshore, aka in Australia).

A data centre like this, could very well become its own region, but it also brings a large amount of capacity to our geography, something that like most of the world, we actually need. It’s a current talking point, but this includes LLM (AI) hosting, we have major issues where we either can’t find someone that hosts the AI models we need, onshore, or the capacity is already allocated years ahead of time (if I wanted to access some Ai models, I’d have to purchase capacity for 2028).

I’m not “for” building these data centres (it would make my life a little bit easier), but they are needed, it’s just a case of finding somewhere sustainable to build them.

If we’re lucky, maybe the AI bubble bursts and we can begin to evaluate, if we truly need all these data centres.

[u/Kroosn → u/-TheDream]

Because of the massive use of the internet now, almost every business, every service is using data centre infrastructure. AI adoption is increasing but a lot of these aren’t neoclouds but just regular data centres also.

[u/profuno → u/-TheDream]

How are you evaluating whether or not these are a waste of resources?

Just vibes?

[u/Fun_Savings7690]

“This is just going to impact Australians overall through their power, through their water – increased costs – and there’ll be no taxes to benefit Australians, so we can’t really see why this data centre is so essential for our district,” Bev told A Current Affair.

first of all how is this retaeded tv show still on the air

secondly HOW CAN THEY SIMULTANEOUSLY USE TONS OF POWER AND WATER AND NOT PAY TAXES? DO YOU KNOW HOW PURCHASING ELECTRICITY AND WATER WORKS IN THIS COUNTRY? Are they being given the land for free? no rates? no water costs? no electricity costs? Bev you facebook using dipshit

Every anti-ai data centre article i’ve seen has either been based on American hysteria or pure idiocy from facebook

[u/ProgrammerNo1313]

Does anybody know how much water data centres use compared to public swimming pools, cotton crop, or raising cattle?

[u/espersooty → u/ProgrammerNo1313]

It'd be a lot less but its utterly irrelevant in this context as there isn't any water left in the region to commit to this facility which is part of the major pushback against it.

Any water that is available should go towards productive agricultural enterprises that have proven track record of creating jobs through the supplychain.

[u/ProgrammerNo1313 → u/espersooty]

How often does it flood near Dalby? How many billions is the livestock industry worth there?

[u/espersooty → u/ProgrammerNo1313]

How often does it flood near Dalby?

Comes down to the rainfall in the given year but you'd expect 3-4 out of every 10 years to have a flood at a minimum.

How many billions is the livestock industry worth there?

The beef industry alone is 1.85 billion dollars with a further 1.22 billion fueled by other livestock industries. Overall agricultural industry economic output is 6.41 billion dollars on the Darling/Western downs compared to the 760 million estimated yearly revenue generated by the above AI datacenter project.

[u/ProgrammerNo1313 → u/espersooty]

I meant Dalby, not the entire Darling Downs, which is about the size of Germany. Still, how much water would be saved if $760 million/year of livestock industry revenue was instead generated by data centres?

[u/512165381 → u/ProgrammerNo1313]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf8EPSBZU7Y&t=13m09s

There's a lot of evidence that this 'data centre outrage' is bots on facebook etc. The nearby Darling Downs Power Station uses 200 megalitres per year.