Post by Rory Corr

The LinkedIn announcements have been hard to miss. American data centre companies are arriving in Australia, and the founding team hires are already underway. Anthropic signed an MOU with the federal government, opened a Sydney office, appointed Theo Hourmouzis as General Manager for ANZ, and is actively recruiting a Data Center Energy Lead. Similarly, Vantage Data Centers committed $1.6 billion to its APAC platform and just appointed Vinit Chitkara as VP of Energy for the region. The energy dimension of this is significant and often underreported. Anthropic's MOU with Canberra explicitly covers investment in data centre infrastructure and firmed renewable energy. SunCable, developing the world's largest proposed solar and storage project, is now prioritising data centre co-location ahead of its Singapore export ambitions. The Australian recently reported speculation that Anthropic may be in conversation with them. Whether or not that specific link materialises, the signal is clear: the biggest players entering this market are not just looking for a building in Sydney. They are thinking about energy at scale. The established operators understand this. They have been getting creative with talent already. Look no further than AirTrunk's recent hire of a Wall Street banker into a senior corporate development role. His background is infrastructure and energy finance, not data centres. That tells you something about where this sector is sourcing capability. The pool of professionals across Australia and APAC with direct data centre finance and investment experience is thin. What the new wave of capital entering this market is discovering is that the relevant skills, long-dated offtake, project finance, energy procurement, infrastructure capital deployment, already exist in the renewable energy and infrastructure finance community.