At a glance

  • OpenAI's deal to anchor a A$7 billion campus at NEXTDC's Eastern Creek site has been a memorandum of understanding since December 2025.
  • The Australian Financial Review reported on 31 August 2026, in an unattributed line, that momentum on setting up the campus has been hampered by slow progress on paying Australian copyright holders.
  • Sam Altman will meet an Australian government delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles in San Francisco, which OpenAI confirmed.
  • A Treasury brief released under freedom of information records Anthropic's Australian investment as contingent on clarity of copyright settings.
  • Attorney-General Michelle Rowland ruled out an exception for text and data mining in October 2025 and is weighing statutory licences, collective licensing and the current voluntary system.

OpenAI's Sydney arrangement is still a memorandum of understanding

OpenAI signed a memorandum of understanding with NEXTDC in December 2025, pledging to anchor a A$7 billion campus at the S7 site at Eastern Creek in Western Sydney. Anthropic ran a tender for at least 1.4GW of AI data centre capacity that closed at the end of March 2026. Neither has been announced as a contract as at 1 September 2026.

The Australian Financial Review reported on 31 August 2026 that Sam Altman will meet an Australian government delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles in San Francisco, and framed the trip as a clock ticking down to signing data centre deals with both companies. On the OpenAI arrangement it reported, without attributing the claim to a named source, that "momentum in setting up the facility has been hampered by slow progress in finding a solution to let AI companies pay content creators and other copyright holders for the works that are used to train and update their models' knowledge". The first phase was announced for the second half of 2027, and neither company has published a change to it. Design work has continued, including a switch from recycled water to waterless cooling at S7 disclosed in July 2026.

Andrew Charlton, the Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, attends the G20 Innovation Ministerial at Chapel Hill in North Carolina on 1 and 2 September 2026 before travelling to San Francisco with Marles. An OpenAI spokeswoman said the focus would be "on how AI can deliver economic, social and security benefits for Australia and create opportunities for local industries and communities". Anthropic declined to say whether chief executive Dario Amodei would meet the delegation.

S7's first phase lands in NEXTDC's 2028 financial year

At its FY26 result briefing on 28 August 2026 chief executive Craig Scroggie said "100 per cent of everything that we require to deliver our FY27 numbers is already locked in", and that "as it relates to 2027, we do not need to do anything that we have not already done". NEXTDC's 2027 financial year ends on 30 June 2027, and the OpenAI campus was announced with its first phase in the second half of calendar 2027. On those dates the copyright question the AFR describes reaches NEXTDC's 2028 financial year.

NEXTDC publishes S7's capacity as a whole site. Its three published figures, 550MW estimated when it bought the Eastern Creek land in October 2024, 612MW in planning documents reported in July 2026 and 650MW on Scroggie's August briefing, measure the whole site on three different bases. Customers had signed for 740.1MW across the company at NEXTDC's 21 July 2026 update to the ASX, and the company has not said whether any S7 capacity sits inside that figure. The December 2025 announcement gave a project value and a site, and no figure for OpenAI's share of either.

A Treasury brief records Anthropic's copyright condition

A Treasury brief prepared for Treasurer Jim Chalmers, released under freedom of information and reported by the AFR on 13 July 2026, says Anthropic's Australian investment, "like data centres, is contingent on clarity of copyright settings". Anthropic asked for certainty over its liability to a long tail of small rights holders it says it cannot practically identify and license. The brief records that it did not ask for an exemption. The AFR describes OpenAI waiting on a way to pay creators, and paying creators is one route to settling a liability question.

Rowland ruled out a text and data mining exception on 26 October 2025, which would have let AI companies use copyright works to train models without a licence, and referred the question to the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group. She is weighing statutory licences with set payments, collective licensing through bodies such as the Copyright Agency, and the existing voluntary system.

Anthropic is working to a harder deadline than OpenAI. It signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the Australian government on 31 March 2026, in the same month its tender for at least 1.4GW closed. Certified Strategic has reported that tender at US$12 billion to US$15 billion, seeking at least 1GW running by the end of 2027, with CDC Data Centres front-runner for about 500MW of it. The tender alone sought close to as much capacity as Australia has running: 1.4GW against the 1.6GW of operating capacity that Data Centres Australia and Mandala, citing DC Byte, published on 26 August 2026.

The AFR puts Anthropic's share market listing "in coming months", at a valuation above US$2 trillion, and reports the company told Australian developers in July 2026 that it would buy any capacity deliverable by the middle of 2027. The ABC published an Infrastructure NSW email on 26 August 2026 recording that Anthropic's chief executive wanted to discuss locating up to 5GW of training capacity in New South Wales outside Sydney.

Copyright reaches into one of the three legs of sovereign AI

Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the UNSW AI Institute, told the AFR that sovereign AI capability takes three things: "compute capacity, the data and models, and humans to build them". He said the government is fixated on the first, and that without the other two "those data centres will just be expensive assets whose profits flow offshore, with few benefits flowing to Australia".

Walsh named two things in that second leg. A copyright settlement reaches the data. Where the models get built is a separate question, and David Wroe made the longer version of that argument for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on 16 July 2026, warning that Australia could end up "a data warehouse for AI products made overseas". Andrew Charlton put numbers on it at the ANU Crawford School on 18 August 2026, saying only a few cents of the AI dollar buys electricity and "perhaps another ten cents buys the physical data centre", with Australia's opportunity in the rest of the stack.

Australia keeps adding to the first leg. AEMO counted 17 data centre projects totalling 9GW of connection applications in its queue at 30 June 2026, against the 1.6GW in operation. The AFR carried undated comments from Marles to the Sydney Morning Herald on 31 August 2026, in which he said of Australia's position in the AI race: "This is as big a sovereignty inflection point as we've seen since the Second World War."

Collective licensing ahead?

A statement of intent or a creators' fund can be signed in San Francisco. Changing what a lab owes for training on Australian works takes legislation, and the Attorney-General's Department has published no deadline for the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group and no legislative timetable. The data centre obligations Albanese announced on 15 July 2026 are expected to be legislated in early 2027.

Anthropic wants capacity deliverable by the middle of 2027 and a listing before that, so a statute passed in 2027 comes too late. Of the three options Rowland is weighing, collective licensing is the closest fit. A collecting society such as the Copyright Agency exists to license the long tail Anthropic says it cannot find, and Australia already licenses education and government copying that way.

What to watch

The Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group. Rowland is weighing statutory licences, collective licensing and the status quo, and only some of those would give Anthropic the liability certainty it asked for.

Whether either arrangement converts. Bids on Anthropic's tender closed at the end of March 2026, and as at 1 September 2026 neither its provider nor any contract behind the OpenAI memorandum has been announced.

NEXTDC's next capacity update. Its 21 July 2026 update put customer-signed capacity at 740.1MW, and any movement at S7 would show up in the next one.

Anthropic's listing. The AFR puts it "in coming months" and reports the company wants Australian capacity secured before it, which sets a deadline on the copyright question.