this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
24 points (100.0% liked)

Australia

5032 readers
167 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
lodion@aussie.zone
bestusername@aussie.zone
eatham@aussie.zone
Nath@aussie.zone
24
AI company Firmus to become Tasmania's biggest power user if three planned sites come to fruition (www.abc.net.au)
submitted 3 days ago by zero_gravitas@aussie.zone to c/australia@aussie.zone
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In short:

Firmus Technologies is building an "AI factory" in Launceston, and plans for two more factories in Tasmania have come to light.

The company is looking to build facilities at Bell Bay in the state's north and Wesley Vale in the north-west.

What's next?

Firmus has submitted a development application for the Wesley Vale site and one for the former pulp mill location at Bell Bay.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] FireWire400@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

AI factory

It's a data centre. You're not fooling anyone by giving it a different name.

[–] zero_gravitas@aussie.zone 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

It's surreal how seemingly everyone in this article - including the journalist - has adopted the rebranding effort.

It's not my area of expertise, but this bit also seems like a nonsensical attempt at selling the 'factory' rebrand spin:

Firmus has said the factory will contain data centre infrastructure and specialised computers that use graphics processing units to produce "AI tokens" needed for tools such as generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in the context of GenAI, 'tokens' are either 'credits' used as the billing unit of a GenAI tool (and they aren't 'produced'), or they are the (transformed) semantic units of a query/response (e.g. words). They aren't some kind of fungible resource produced like a good output from a factory to then be used by some other tool as this would imply. Am I misinterpreting the implications of that paragraph? Maybe it's not deliberate and the journo is just out of their depth?

[–] FireWire400@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It’s surreal how seemingly everyone in this article - including the journalist - has adopted the rebranding effort.

I'm frustrated with that shit, it is a data centre with all the environmental and humanitarian implications, yet they seem 100% on board with it and with adapting Firmus' stupid attempt at a rebrand. Great journalism.

[–] Salvo@aussie.zone 1 points 2 days ago

This is just more CryptoCurrency.

[–] beeng@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Tokens are indeed produced, by the tokenizer.

Then they go through the transformer, where they go forward and backwards inside until they pop out as a coherent (depending on the input) reply.

Words > tokens > Transformer > tokens > words.

Looks like a production line to me.

[–] Salvo@aussie.zone 2 points 2 days ago

A data centre is where data is stored. This is where data is crunched and analysed and taken apart and put back together to create absolute garbage.

It is a BS factory.