Australia's DCI Data Centers (DCI) has secured land and power for a 20MW data center in Jerrabomba, outside the capital city of Canberra.
Named CBRO1, the cloud Edge data center will service the Canberra market and is to be situated in Poplar’s Innovation Precinct. CBR01 will be ready for service in 2024.
Poplar’s Innovation Precinct is an estate built in the Canberra region with the intent to bring together businesses with an interest in defense, space, cyber-security, and high-tech manufacturing. DCI is one of the first companies to commit to the location.
The new data center will have an initial capacity of 20MW spread across eight data halls, and will also be home to secure offices and storage on the 4-hectare site.
The facility, while serving the Canberra area, will run on a separate grid to the region as part of a multi-party agreement and investment between DCI, Poplars, and other power users that will see a 132kV powerline be built by Essential Energy.
DCI chair, and Brookfield managing director, Udhay Mathialagan said of the agreement: “This separate grid will support cloud services and provides resilience for the Canberra market and Capital Region. It also means that with our commitment to the site, we will expedite the development of the Precinct which will positively impact the region for future generations.”
The facility will, according to a press release, be built using ‘environmentally efficient technologies and construction methods’.
“Our approach to construction has a laser focus on sustainability, including industry-leading delivery of new cooling technologies which significantly enhance our Power and Water Utilisation effectiveness. This allows our customers to achieve a substantial reduction in energy costs and environmental emissions,” said Malcolm Roe, DCI CEO for Australia and New Zealand.
The new DCI data center comes in response to the Commonwealth’s mandate to supply geographical and supply chain diversity for Government and public cloud workloads at scale.
DCI, a portfolio company of Brookfield Asset Management, has been investing in new data centers over the last two years, including increasing capacity in Adelaide, and building new data centers in Darwin and Sydney. According to Roe, the company’s data center footprint in Australia will reach 100MW by 2024.
