Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a date for a sit-down with US President Donald Trump, with October 20 penciled in for a meeting at the White House – which probably means it’s about to start raining data centres.
The last time the Prime Minister was at the White House, in October last year, Microsoft was on hand announcing it would invest US$5 billion in new data centre capacity. Given the scale of data centre investment commitments made in recent months, that US$5 billion seems like small beer.
A week ago during the Trump state visit to the United Kingdon, Microsoft announced that it would spend US$30 billion over the next five years on data centres and AI initiatives in the UK.
The Microsoft commitment was part of a £31 billion (A$63 billion) Tech Prosperity Deal signed between the countries – with commitments from companies like Google, Amazon and OpenAI.
It’s a reasonable bet that an Albanese visit to the White House will be buttressed by a similar program of announcements on data centres and AI. Critical mineral supply chains would also be a safe bet.
A great background summary of some data centres issues can be found in this AFR article by Michael Read and Amelia McGuire. There are interesting comments from Ed Husic on how the big tech companies “need to do a better job of proving what the residual economic benefit is for Australia”.
The Prime Minister has been active on industry portfolio issues, spruiking Australia as an investment destination for US companies – particularly in advanced manufacturing, renewables and critical minerals.
The biggest news in the global quantum sector came from Diraq, which announced via an article in Nature that it can produce its silicon quantum dot qubits in a manufacturing environment with consistently low error rates.
The demonstration that it can build chips at-scale is a critical step toward the company building a commercially useful, utility-scale quantum computer.
Meanwhile, the Industry department says an independent report into its handling of the PsiQuantum investment had found that it had followed all the required systems and processes – effectively giving the department a tick of approval.
The McGrath Nichol report was commissioned a year ago. It’s one of those strange documents, narrow in scope, that gets quietly published late on a Friday.
In the news:
Albanese spruiks renewables, manufacturing to US investors – InnovationAus [Subscriber]
Australia working on data centre strategy, but risks being left behind – AFR [$]
Nvidia boss says UK will be ‘AI superpower’ as tech firms invest billions – BBC
The US-UK tech prosperity deal carries promise but also peril for the general public – The Conversation
‘Off to the races’: Diraq proves chips can be manufactured at scale – InnovationAus [Subscriber]
EU chief backs Australia’s ‘common sense’ social media age ban – InnovationAus
SERD seeks research funding revamp to boost translation – InnovationAus [Subscriber]
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