Australia’s current AI infrastructure debate has been reduced to data centres, but the local benefit from the boom is far from automatic.
Anton van den Hengel, chief scientist at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, has a vision for what that benefit could look like at full scale: an export industry in tokens that “could well and truly eclipse the value of mining” — clean, renewable-powered and very valuable.
Australia is already one of the world’s highest per-capita users of AI. The problem, van den Hengel says, is that we’ve almost entirely failed to build any of it ourselves. “We are thus very late to the party.”
Now the party has come to us, in the form of Anthropic’s reported quest for 1.4 gigawatts of compute capacity. The question is whether we know how to answer the door.
