Anthropic Signs First Australia Lease at Zerra’s 2.16 GW Queensland Campus
On September 16, 2026, Reuters reported Anthropic signed its first Australian data-centre lease, at Singapore-based Zerra DC’s Western Downs Digital Park in Queensland—a planned 2.16 GW campus about 250 km from Brisbane, online from 2027, for inference not training. FIRB still required. Both firms declined comment.
TLDR
Reuters, dateline Sydney, September 16, 2026, citing two people familiar: Anthropic signed its first Australia data-centre lease. Site: Western Downs Digital Park, farmland ~250 km (150 miles) from Brisbane, Queensland, developed by Singapore-based Zerra DC (AFR: AGP vehicle; campus cost around A$30 billion). Planned campus capacity 2.16 GW; first capacity online 2027. Use: inference, not training. Cooling: closed-loop, air-cooled (cuts clean-water draw). Zerra would source renewable PPAs and bear grid-connection cost without passing it to existing customers, the people said. Deal is subject to Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) approval. Anthropic and Zerra declined to comment. No official lab newsroom post.
Product-line de-dupe: not Anthropic–Lambda / Hut 8 Texas (Sep 1), not Nvidia Australia 2 GW (Sep 9 re-pass, unfiled), not OpenAI’s Sydney offtake (last year, Reuters context). This is Anthropic’s first AU lease, and it is run-Claude, not train-Claude.
Why this story matters
Frontier inference is following cheap renewable megawatts out of Sydney/Melbourne—and around Australia’s coming training-content rules. Watch: FIRB, and whether “inference only” survives the first cluster that actually lights up.