Australian neocloud Firmus Technologies has proposed a third data center project in Tasmania.

The company filed plans for a 52MW data center in Wesley Vale at the old paper mill site in Mill Park, located at 226 Mill Road.

As reported by ABC News, the application was filed several months ago but was not publicly released until additional information was provided by Firmus.

According to the Wesley Vale project page on Firmus' website, the company is planning to construct a principal data hall building at the site along with technical and administrative areas.

The application documents suggest it will span 3,500 sqm (37,695 sq ft), with the data hall comprising 2,690 sqm (28,945 sq ft) of floor space. The building will have an approximate roof height of 8.5 meters, while the rooftop plant will increase its overall height to 15 meters.

The company notes that power utility TasNetworks owns and operates major electricity transmission infrastructure in proximity to the site, including the adjoining Wesley Vale substation, which "makes Wesley Vale a suitable location for an initial connection at 26MW, using existing industrial electrical infrastructure without disrupting local distribution networks."

Firmus said it will also invest in upgrades to the Wesley Vale substation to support a future 26MW connection once those works are complete. Of the 52MW of capacity, 46MW will be used for critical IT load.

Forty diesel generators will be placed at the site to provide backup power.

The company states that its data centers are designed to use "a very limited amount of water," which is only needed on hot days, with the company using its HyperCube cooling system.

According to ABC, the company previously said it would be using water from Tasmanian Irrigation, which supplies water to agricultural users, and said at the time that it was not legally allowed to provide water to data centers. At the time of writing, no mention of Tasmanian Irrigation is made, with the company now stating it will use rainwater and water delivered by truck.

The public can provide comment on the project until September 9. The Latrobe council will consider the application later this year.

Firmus was also recently granted approval for its 288MW data center project in the Bell Bay Advanced Manufacturing Zone in northern Tasmania. In addition, the company is building a 104MW data center in Launceston, St Leonards.

All three projects fall under Firmus' "Project Southgate" moniker, a long-term initiative to design and deploy sovereign compute in Australia for AI training and inference, according to the company, with plans to deploy 1.6GW of capacity through to 2028.

Last month, Firmus raised $2 billion in an equity investment round, which will be used to fund Project Southgate. The company also entered into a binding agreement to acquire HVAC and mechanical systems developer Benmax's "Fabrication, Design, and Projects" business. Benmax is the manufacturer behind Firmus' HyperCube modular data center solution, which enables Firmus to build AI compute capacity quickly.