Post #4087723

South Australia’s PEAK electricity demand was in 2025, when it reached 3.3 GW. Ping @davidgerard@circumstances.run Firmus, a datacenter company which owns zero datacenters, has been sprinkling council development approvals around Australia like confetti. One of them asks if it can build a 1 GW facility at Tailem Bend. Not only has Firmus never built any datacenters before, but nobody in the world has ever built a 1 GW datacenter. A 1 GW facility requires scalable solutions to engineering problems nobody else has encountered. A gigawatt is about 1/3rd of South Australia’s historical peak electrical demand, or about half of their normal demand. Firmus has also proposed a 1.3 GW facility near Port Augusta. If built — which is incredibly unlikely — these two facilities combined will consume approximately the same amount of electricity as the typical daytime demand of the entire State. It seems unlikely that either of these will be built. South Australia doesn’t have enough generation capacity to power them, and Firmus doesn’t have enough money to augment the grid to accommodate their own forecasts. If they build anything at all, it’ll be MW-scale, not GW-scale. These are dead projects walking, but Firmus still claims to be worth $15.5 billion with Nvidia’s backing, despite zero revenue and zero infrastructure. Also: Stop calling them “AI factories,” you fucking idiots. https://www.afr.com/companies/infrastructure/firmus-tries-to-fast-track-sa-data-centres-as-tassie-plans-stall-20260720-p60gwj