The CEOs of AI titans Microsoft and Anthropic have been duchessing Canberra. The reason? They have bet the house that we are at the beginning of an AI gold rush and they have a big problem: they need to find secure places to train their massive models.

Having exhausted the US’s public tolerance for data centres and the eye-popping amount of energy and water they consume, these companies need stable bases to power these mega-data projects to drive their technology. This requires access to space, renewable energy and a stable political environment, resources that are in short supply globally.

Assuming you are prepared to wager that AI is neither an unsustainable bubble nor a fast track to social breakdown and global annihilation (and to be clear, I have a foot in both these camps), then there appears to be a live pitch for Australia to produce artificial intelligence the way the Middle East produces oil.

It’s not just the datacentres that are popping up around the suburbs to power the tokens used by local businesses. This is an industrial scale rollout to drive the inner workings of the technology, requiring significant energy and social licence from an increasingly sceptical public.

With my reservations about AI noted, if there is a deal on the table then let’s make sure it’s a good one. We could start by taking a leaf out of the Norwegian play book and be much more ambitious in the stake we seek in this nascent industry.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, built on the discovery........

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