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Tasmania is set to be the stage for one of Australia’s largest AI data centres thanks to a multibillion-dollar investment from private tech firm Firmus Technologies.
The tech firm chose Tasmania for its vast renewable energy capabilities, making AI development cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
“With Tasmania’s clean energy and our AI factory platform, we believe this will be the most cost-effective, sustainable AI facility in the world,” said Firmus Technologies co-CEO Oliver Curtis.
“AI tools like ChatGPT run on tokens that are currently heavy on energy and emissions,” said co-CEO Tim Rosenfield.
“Producing these AI tokens in Tasmania will create a new type of green AI token, clean and powered by renewables, enabling AI to scale sustainably.”
The data centre will have vast applications, powering gaming, ChatGPT-style chatbots and more, with Curtis saying that it will be “purpose-built to power, train and inference artificial intelligence”.
Starting with a $2.1 billion investment, Firmus Technologies will build an AI “factory” in its first phase, which will create 100 jobs and house 16,000 specialised computer processors. This will open in early 2026.
Tasmanian Premier and Liberal Party MP Jeremy Rockliff called the investment the beginning of a “world-first AI factory zone”.
“This is about turning Tasmania’s clean energy into opportunity,” Rockliff said.
Similarly, Labor leader Dean Winter said that the development is a “really exciting opportunity for the north”.
“It is extremely exciting what they’re proposing there, and I’ve been lucky enough to have a good look at Firmus and what they’ve been doing,” Winter said.
However, Winter said there is not sufficient power for the AI facility.
“There’s a big problem here. There isn’t enough power. We saw only earlier this week that Boyer said there’s no power available for them to convert from coal to electricity,” he said.
OpenAI, for example, uses incredible levels of power, using more power than Pittsburgh in the US, while Microsoft’s new 1 gigawatt data centre is the equivalent to powering 750,000 homes.
The new facility will go live at 45 megawatts in early 2026, before ramping up to 90 megawatts by the end of the year.
If successful, the centre will grow to 300 megawatts in the second stage.
While the cost to taxpayers has not been established, Pulse Tasmania has reported that the Liberal Party would work with the tech firm to ensure it has what it needs to establish the major AI centre.
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