Telecommunications company Spark New Zealand plans to build a data center in Auckland’s North Shore.
Spark said that it had reached a conditional agreement to purchase land for the initial 10MW deployment, with the option for further expansion.
The company is developing three 'large-scale' data center campuses in Auckland, along with a network of regional data centers across the country, as part of a NZ$156-189 million (US$95-115m) expansion plan.
As part of its Auckland build-out, the company completed a 10MW expansion of its Takanini data center last August, which it claims drove a 38.5 percent revenue increase to $18 million.
“We are now planning to invest in a new hyperscale data center campus on Auckland’s North Shore, as demand for capacity continues to grow," Spark CEO Jolie Hodson said.
“Our digital infrastructure investments into data centers and 5G standalone are progressing at pace. These investments underpin ongoing strength in our core business and new high-tech commercialization opportunities that will build our growth engines of the future.
In 2022, the company announced that it would sell a 70 percent stake in its towers business to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board for US$564 million to focus on its 5G and data center build-out.
The telco incumbent said that its revenues and earnings grew in the first half of its 2024 financial year - if you adjust for the tower sale. Mobile service revenue increased 6.3 percent to NZ$510m (US$311m).
The new data center will join a growing number of facilities in New Zealand. Hyperscalers Microsoft and AWS are both planning cloud regions in the country, while Canberra Data Centres (CDC) is planning a 7,000 sqm facility in Hobsonville and an 11,000 sqm data center in Silverdale that has begun construction. Those developments could total around 80MW of capacity.
On the south island, Hawaiki Cable founder Remi Galasso is planning a 60MW facility near Invercargill.
UK-based digital infrastructure startup Lake Parime announced plans to build a 10MW data center next to a dam near Clyde back in 2021, but the company went into liquidation last year.
