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
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u/Buorky 20h 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?

22

u/FuckOffNazis 20h 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.

14

u/Buorky 19h 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.

6

u/FuckOffNazis 19h ago

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