Christmas Island:
Google plans to build a large artificial intelligence data centre on Australia’s remote Indian Ocean outpost of Christmas Island after signing a cloud deal with the Department of Defence earlier this year.
- Christmas Island is an island in the Indian Ocean.
- It lies about 360 km south of the island of Java and 1,400 km northwest of Australia.
- It is administered as an external territory of Australia.
- The island is the summit of an oceanic mountain whose highest point on the island is Murray Hill, rising to 1,184 feet (361 metres) in the western part of the island.
- The main settlement and chief port is at Flying Fish Cove on the northeastern part of the island.
- Although Europeans sighted Christmas Island in 1615, it was named for the day of its rediscovery in 1643.
- The discovery of phosphate on the island in 1887 led to the UK annexing it the following year.
- In 1900 Christmas Island was incorporated in the British crown colony of the Straits Settlements with its capital at Singapore.
- During World War II the island was occupied by the Japanese.
- In 1958 the island became an Australian territory.
- Tropical rainforest covers most of Christmas Island, and fauna includes large numbers of seabirds, small reptiles, land crabs, and insects.
- One of the island’s best-known animal residents is the Christmas Island red crab (Gecarcoidea natalis), whose spectacular annual emergence and migration draws large numbers of tourists.
- The population includes many ethnic Chinese, a small number of people of European ancestry, and Malay labourers recruited mainly from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
- The territory’s economy was long based almost entirely on the mining and extraction of phosphate.
- With the recoverable reserves of phosphate nearly exhausted, efforts were turned toward developing tourism.
- Small-scale subsistence cropping and fishing are practiced, but most food is imported.
