Google planning powerful AI data centre on tiny Australian Indian Ocean outpost (www.reuters.com)

Google is planning a major AI data centre on remote Christmas Island after signing a three‑year cloud deal with Australia’s Department of Defence, Reuters reports. Details such as size, cost and exact uses remain secret, but Google has applied for environmental approval to lay a new subsea cable to Darwin (to be installed by U.S. firm SubCom) and is in talks to lease land near the island airport. Military strategists say the facility would serve as a forward command-and-control node for AI-enabled surveillance and uncrewed systems, offering higher bandwidth and greater resilience than satellite links in a crisis and improving real‑time cloud access across the Indian Ocean theatre. For the AI/ML community this signals growing demand for low-latency, secure cloud-edge infrastructure and models tailored to distributed, contested environments. Key technical implications include deployment of latency-sensitive inference and control stacks for uncrewed platforms, hybrid cloud/edge MLOps, secure enclaves and data‑sovereignty controls, and increased emphasis on resilient networking (subsea cables) versus satellite. It also raises governance questions about dual‑use AI, community impacts, and how commercial cloud providers will balance civilian benefits (jobs, connectivity) with defence-linked applications and oversight.