Macquarie is advising the newly formed Anthropic joint venture Theseus Infrastructure on a potential financing for a large data centre in Queensland, sources said.

The deal, codenamed ‘Project Interstellar’, has six banks lined up to underwrite it, the sources told NPM.

Construction is slated to begin on a site in Western Downs, Queensland, by September 2027. The financing is expected to be around the AUD 4bn (USD 2.84bn) mark, they said.

Macquarie Asset Management (MAM) and Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC revealed on August 10 a strategic partnership named Theseus Infrastructure, which plans to develop, operate and lease data centre infrastructure to AI researcher and developer Anthropic under long-term agreements.

Funds managed by MAM and GIC will own the Theseus platform and fund most of the equity for each project. The announcement said the platform will initially focus on the United States.

Anthropic said it was looking to invest in data centre infrastructure and energy investments in Australia when it announced it had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Australian federal government to work on AI safety as part of Australia’s National AI Plan.

Anthropic’s large language model AI agent Claude is among the most popular in the world, with Australia and New Zealand the eighth-biggest users of the technology relative to population.

Anthropic said on March 31 it was opening an office in Sydney as part of its expansion into Australia and New Zealand. It also has offices in Tokyo, Japan, Bengaluru, India and Seoul, Korea.

That announcement pointed to Anthropic’s interest in using third-party partnerships in Australia to add local capacity via existing infrastructure as well as “early conversations about longer-term infrastructure in the region.”

Anthropic, GIC and Macquarie declined to comment.