Google may be planning for AI data centre on tiny Australian island: What makes this so ‘important’

Google is reportedly planning to construct a large artificial intelligence (AI) data centre on Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. The unconfirmed plan, which has not been previously reported, is linked to a cloud computing agreement signed with the Australian Department of Defence earlier this year.

According to a report by news agency Reuters, while many details, including the project’s size and cost, remain undisclosed, military experts view the facility as a significant strategic asset due to the island’s critical location.

A frontline for military defence

Christmas Island, located approximately 350 km south of Indonesia, is increasingly seen by defence officials as a critical frontline for monitoring Chinese submarine and other naval activity in the Indian Ocean. Local Christmas Island Shire officials and council meeting records indicate Google is in advanced negotiations to lease land near the island's airport for the data hub.

The island’s military importance was recently highlighted in a tabletop war game involving the Australian, US, and Japanese militaries. Bryan Clark, a former US Navy strategist who ran the war games, stated that a forward “command and control” node on Christmas Island would be critical in a crisis with China or another adversary.

“The data centre is partly to allow you to do the kinds of AI-enabled command and control that you need to do in the future, especially if you rely on uncrewed systems for surveillance missions and targeting missions and even engagements,” Clark, now a Hudson Institute fellow, told Reuters.

Clark noted that subsea cables provide essential bandwidth and greater reliability compared to satellite communications, which would be expected to be jammed in a crisis.

“If you've got a data centre on Christmas, you can do a lot of that through cloud infrastructure,” he added.

The report claims that Google applied last month for Australian environmental approvals to build the first subsea cable connecting Christmas Island to the northern Australian city of Darwin, where the US Marine Corps is based for six months of the year.

Reuters says that documents confirm the cable link for Google will be installed by US company SubCom, which also previously connected the U.S./UK military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.