$1B data centre for city

AIR Trunk, the home-grown Macquarie-backed tech company, has filed plans to build a giant data centre in Blacktown with an investment of nearly a billion dollars.

The hyperscale data centre will sit across 123,000sq m in a seven-storey building and have a capacity of more than 320 megawatts.

It is a welcome return to Blacktown for the now major international company that started out in the area just a handful of years ago. It was founded by Robin Khuda when he realised the need for massive data centres in the new world of cloud computing.

The Asia-Pacific hyperscale data centre specialist, AirTrunk announced its plans to build the new Western Sydney data centre, named AirTrunk SYD3.

The hyperscale data centre will be the largest single campus in the Asia-Pacific region excluding China at 320+ megawatt of capacity.

SYD3 will be AirTrunk’s third Sydney data centre, joining SYD1 in Western Sydney and SYD2 in the city’s north.

The ‘AirTrunk Western Sydney Region’ expands to 450+ MW with the SYD1 and SYD3 connected campuses allowing new and existing customers to grow seamlessly within the strategic cloud availability zone.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AirTrunk Robin Khuda said: “It’s an exciting day as we circle back to Western Sydney where it all began for AirTrunk when we launched our flagship SYD1 data centre in late 2017.”

“With SYD1 nearing full capacity, SYD3’s location less than one kilometre away, will help our major technology customers scale with ease and creates synergies and efficiencies between the connected campuses.”

SYD3 will include nine phases set across 8.3ha delivering 320+ MW of IT load and will be powered by a 132KV onsite substation.

Like AirTrunk’s other data centres, SYD3 is designed to an industry-low power usage effectiveness of 1.15 and will utilise approximately 80% less water than a traditional data centre. It will feature a range of innovations during design, construction and operation to deliver efficiencies and minimise carbon impact for customers and communities.

The data centre will bring a new multi-billion-dollar investment into the West and will create hundreds of new jobs in Western Sydney during both the construction and operational phases.

SYD3 brings AirTrunk’s Asia-Pacific platform to a total of seven hyperscale data centres with a total capacity of more than a gigawatt, providing a connected, secure, efficient and sustainable home for the cloud across the region.

Since pioneering hyperscale data centres in Asia Pacific with the launch of its first data centres in Sydney and Melbourne in late 2017, AirTrunk has strategically expanded into key markets across Asia including Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo.