AirTrunk Plans Huge Data Centre in Sydney’s West

AirTrunk, the home-grown Macquarie-backed tech company, has filed plans to build a giant data centre in western Sydney, which when complete will represent an investment of nearly a billion dollars.

Documents before the New South Wales department of planning say the hyperscale data centre will sit across 123,000sq m in a seven-storey building and have a capacity of more than 320 megawatts.

That will make the centre the biggest in the Asia-Pacific region, outside China.

AirTrunk, which counts Macquarie Asset Management and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) as major stakeholders, acquired the 9ha site at 51 Huntingwood Drive, 30km west of Sydney, in November 2021 for $110 million.

It purchased the site from Endeavour Energy which has about 2.6 million customers across Greater Western Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Southern Highlands.

Known as SYD3, the data centre will be built in stages and include two substations, 30 diesel fuel storage tanks, 216 emergency back-up generators, three below-ground water tanks—each with a 335,000 litre capacity—172 hybrid dry-coolers and 86 water-cooled chillers.

Design estimates by Greenbox Architecture show the building itself will rise nearly 50m and house 2592 lithium-ion battery cabinets, with a total weight of about 730 tonnes.

Town planners Willowtree Planning lodged the documents for the state significant development on behalf of property developer and asset manager EMKC³.

▲ AirTrunk has 10 data centres across Asia-Pacific and Japan. This will be its fourth in Australia and the biggest in the region.

Willowtree said the facility would house and deliver cloud-based storage to service the global market, particularly clients in the wider Sydney metropolitan area. 

There were limited suitable sites for data centres, particularly in cities such as Sydney, the planners said.

“A site must be large enough to fit the required capacity and located in close proximity to primary demand, in this case, Sydney’s CBD,” Willowtree wrote.  “The site must also be located within certain proximity to other data centres which are owned and operated by the end user. 

“The creation of the region is what delivers the capacity, latency/speed, reliability, and security that is required by customers.

“A significant part of a data centre’s function is to facilitate the ongoing operation of critical infrastructure and delivery of critical services, such as energy, water, food, transport, health, banking, and finance.

“It is imperative that the operations of data centres are completely secure and resilient.”

It’s estimated the data centre will create 1333 jobs during construction, and another 276 full-time jobs when it is operational.  The centre will be staffed for 24 hours each day.

SYD3 is AirTrunk’s third Sydney data centre, joining SYD1 also in western Sydney with a capacity of about 130mw and SYD2 in the city’s north with 110mw. There is a fourth facility in Melbourne.

“With SYD1 nearing full capacity, SYD3’s location less than 1km away will help our major technology customers scale with ease and creates synergies and efficiencies between the connected campuses,” AirTrunk’s founder and chief executive Robin Khuda said when the plans for the hyperscale data centre were first mooted.

The term “hyperscale” refers to a computer architecture’s ability to scale in order to respond to increasing demand.