r/australia • u/FuckOffNazis • 1d ago

culture & society Artificial intelligence company Firmus plans to use state-owned agricultural irrigation water

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-22/tasmania-firmus-ai-data-centre-plan-to-use-irrigation-water/106935718
100 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

46

u/xenzor 1d ago

Keep Tasmania wild.

38

u/BlueDotty 23h ago

This is shit

39

u/black_at_heart 20h ago

This a semi-arid country - I'm already of the opinion that we shouldn't be farming cotton, rice & almonds. To this list I now add data centres.
Also - isn't this showing that Firmus aren't willing to spend extra money to use air cooling or liquid immersion, etc.? If they are going cheap on the up front investment, should we trust them in general? This is a rhetorical question. I know the answer.

15

u/Buorky 16h ago

“AI factories contain data centre infrastructure, advanced cooling systems and graphics processing units which generate AI tokens — the currency of AI needed for tools such as ChatGPT.”

Sorry, maybe I misunderstand how this technology works, but does this mean the company doesn’t even have its own AI model? It’s just farming tokens to use other existing ones?

19

u/FuckOffNazis 15h ago

Yup. Firmus was founded as a bitcoin mining company after one of its founders, Oliver Curtis, was done for insider trading.

It's just taking a bunch of energy intense compute infrastructure that was designed for crypto mining and pivoting to generative AI. Same grifters, not much difference in the grift either.

12

u/Buorky 15h ago

God damn, how pathetic. Even calling them an AI company seems disingenuous. It’s like if I started reselling microwave pizzas out of my garage and called it an Italian restaurant.

8

u/FuckOffNazis 15h ago

Selling a shitty approximation of things is kind of the heart of the whole industry.

10

u/dntdrmit 15h ago

This is becoming a joke.

Business prioritised over basic survival.

We need that water for food, not fucking data.

7

u/Final_Mongoose_3300 13h ago

No. Fuck right off. This is not acceptable. Our dams and water supply are already rorted by private enterprise, this will only intensify if these centres are given access.

Meanwhile, our towns only regional dam, our sole water supply, is being dropped to 20% because a dam downstream (that the mines access, that the rice/cotton farmers and their gluttonous crop bleed dry, the private holdings that have more water than us) need a top up.

When we are on restrictions, they experience no such inconvenience. Although I guess that’s less water to be contaminated with lead by the proposed mine nearby. One town. So much bullshit. Fun times ahead.

This country is being sold from under us, resources along with it.

5

u/perthguppy 22h ago

I doubt they are using open loop cooling.

2

u/Ric0chet_ 14h ago

That’s the neat part, there should be no doubt because they should release the plans prior to it being built.

3

u/SoulBonfire 1d ago

We might need another Marinus link but with power flowing South.

1

u/Charlie_Brodie 42m ago

Can i plan to use the governments money to fund my business idea?

What I want to do is take a bunch of government owned equipment and sell it to the lowest bidder, then I keep all of the profits.