On November 6, Reuters reported that Google was planning to build a large artificial intelligence data center on Australia’s Indian Ocean territory—Christmas Island—after signing a deal with the Australian Department of Defense earlier this year. Reportedly, Reuters had reviewed documents and interviewed officials related to this plan. The specifics of the data center—such as its projected size, cost, and potential uses—remain secret. Google is allegedly in advanced talks to lease land near the island’s airport and has completed a deal with a local mining company to secure its energy needs, Christmas Island Shire council meeting records show.

Military experts say such a facility would be valuable to the island, “which is increasingly seen by defense officials as a critical frontline in monitoring Chinese submarine and naval activity in the Indian Ocean.” A recent war game demonstrated Christmas Island’s role as an Australian forward line of defense in a regional conflict, serving as a launch site for uncrewed weapons systems or drones. In a crisis with China or another adversary in the region, one expert said that having command and control assets on Christmas Island would be critical. According to Bryan Clark, who ran the war games, “The data center is partly to allow you to do the kinds of AI-enabled command and control that you need to do in the future, especially if you rely on uncrewed systems for surveillance missions and targeting missions and even engagements.”

The media immediately jumped on the bandwagon. Google’s presence in the AI space has been growing. In September, it announced the opening of a new UK AI data center as part of a two-year $6.82 billion investment program. Google DeepMind  cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis said, “We founded DeepMind in London because we knew the UK had the potential and talent to be a global hub for pioneering AI.” Given the potential military applications of AI and Christmas Island’s strategic location between Africa, Asia, and Australia, a new data center could be commercially advantageous for Google. Reuters quoted Australian Navy Commodore Peter Leavy as saying,  “Christmas Island is quite well positioned to at least monitor what is going through Sunda Strait, Lombok Strait, Malacca Straits. It is a really good location.”

But before the experts get too carried away, let’s think critically and consider whether this is more akin to an AI hallucination than a concrete investment strategy.

Christmas Island is certainly geostrategically important, located in the Indian Ocean, 350 kilometers south of Java, and 1,550 kilometers from the mainland Australia. The Japanese certainly thought so, bombing it in March 1942, destroying the radio station before invading it to secure the phosphate mine for its military supply chain. Not much phosphate was exported because of local saboteurs and Allied torpedoing of cargo ships. The Australian government has greatly valued it after the phosphate mine closed, using it in the 1990s and 2000s to house politically problematic refugees and illegal immigrants.

Its isolation and geographic features immediately signal just how infeasible housing a militarily-sensitive—or indeed any—data center there actually is. The last thing anyone should want to house there is valuable data assets. It’s easy to bomb and hard to defend, and costly to supply almost anything on the 52-square-mile island, which has no surface water. Electricity is supplied by diesel generators, and the only water available comes from rain-sourced underground aquifers. The island has an average annual rainfall of about 85 inches, but that is not much water in total, given the small land area. The average daily temperature varies little from the average of 79 degrees. The business case for the energy or cooling facilities required to run a state-of-the-art data center appears severely challenged by this prospect.

Fortunately, Google was quick to deny any plans of this sort. The island is potentially very valuable for the firm as a staging post in the building of its undersea fiber cable from Darwin to Singapore, announced in December last year. The land near the airport and the modest electricity supplies negotiated for will be very useful in both the laying of the cable and its subsequent operation.

If AI didn’t write the story, then it is hard to see how it came about, given how absurd the proposition is. Maybe someone asked Santa for an