Google says project on famous crab-covered island is about cables, not combat (arstechnica.com)

Reuters reports that Google is planning a previously undisclosed AI data center on Christmas Island, a 52-square-mile Australian territory about 220 miles south of Indonesia, following a three-year cloud deal with Australia’s military signed in July 2025. The project would include a subsea cable to Darwin (where US Marines rotate for six months a year) and is being framed by military strategists as a forward position to monitor Chinese naval activity and traffic through the Sunda, Lombok, and Malacca straits. Details on size, cost and capabilities remain secret and both Google and Australia’s Department of Defense declined to comment. For the AI/ML community this signals growing investment in edge and defense-focused compute—low-latency infrastructure co-located with strategic maritime choke points could enable real-time, AI-powered command-and-control, distributed sensor fusion, and deployment of uncrewed systems. It also raises technical and ethical implications: locked-down, classified workstreams could accelerate military ML applications with limited transparency, while environmental and logistical constraints (a planned subsea cable, the island’s famed 100+ million red crab migration, and limited local telecoms) will shape engineering trade-offs for resilience, data flows, and operational continuity.