PEOPLE First Party leader and former senator Gerard Rennick has a close eye on the planned $32 billion Western Downs Digital Park artificial intelligence development near Dalby and has called for more transparency around the project.
Rennick is a former resident of Chinchilla, 55 minutes northwest of Dalby, and has noted that the new AI facility will rely on rain water harvesting to source its water supply of up to 21,000 litres a day. Toowoomba is an hour from Dalby.
He is not opposing the facility, and says it’s preposterous that Chris “Blackout” Bowen is insisting that data centres be powered by renewables rather than coal and points out that the nearby Kogan Creek coal fired power station has a vacant pad for another turbine and is sitting on 400 million tonnes of coal.
“Why would anyone destroy valuable farmland with renewables? It’s just madness. The obsession with renewables needs to end,” he says.
“People First will abolish all subsidies for renewables and require environmental bonds to paid on existing sites.”
On the water use issue, he said that as someone who has watched farmers having to give up their irrigation licences to “save the environment” how is it that a foreign owned company is going to be allowed to ‘harvest’ water but farmers can’t.
“This is a classic example of one rule for wealthy foreigners and another one hard working Australians. There had better be a lot more transparency around exactly how much water this data centre is going to harvest and what impact will it have on downstream communities like my hometown of Chinchilla.”
He urged people wishing to protect both the environment and farmland sign up to http://PeopleFirstParty.au.
A development application prepared for construction company Zerra DC has been lodged for the Western Downs Digital Park. The Singapore-based company develops and operates massive, high-capacity data centre campuses across the Asia-Pacific region.
The site is at 1933 Dalby–Kogan Road, Kogan (35 km from Dalby), and once constructed, it will be considered one of Australia’s largest data centres, although technically, it is not a data centre but an AI facility or factory.
Data centres act as digital warehouses running enterprise applications, hosting websites, managing databases, and handle general cloud storage with relatively small workforces, whereas the Dalby AI facility expects an ongoing workforce of some 1400.
Data centres rely heavily on CPUs (Central Processing Units), which are general-purpose processors designed to handle diverse, sequential workloads one step at a time.
An AI centre functions as an intelligence generator and is built specifically for the heavy lifting of the AI lifecycle, such as training massive large language models, fine-tuning, and running high-volume inference.
The AI centre relies heavily on GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), TPUs, and specialized AI accelerators – chips that excel at massive parallel processing, allowing millions of calculations to happen simultaneously.
The Dalby facility will have an on-site battery-backed power conditioning system to support electricity requirements, which the project backers say will strengthen the local power network.
The site’s proximity to existing energy infrastructure is identified as a key factor in its suitability for the development.
