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Digital Realty doubles down on data centres
US data centre giant Digital Realty will build two linked facilities in Sydney's west, taking its total investment in this country to $2.7 billion, in one of the biggest developments in the Australian market so far. Together, the facilities when fully developed on two nearby sites will expand Digital Realty's total Australian data centre footprint to close to 300 megawatts. It is a dramatic scaling up from the 50-megawatt portfolio the US player already controls across five centres in Sydney and Melbourne. As a linked campus of 250 megawatts when fully developed, it will be Digital Realty's biggest in the Asia-Pacific region and become Sydney's largest connected campus.
"We have been investing in the Australian market for some time, but this is clearly a different level of engagement with the market," Mark Smith, Digital Realty’s managing director for the Asia-Pacific region told The Australian Financial Review." It shows in dollar terms our excitement for the growth of the overall cloud industry, the IT industry and therefore the data industry in Sydney."
Less than one kilometre apart, the two sites will be physically linked, allowing them to operate as one data centre campus. Construction is expected to be complete by the end of 2022.Digital Realty's ambitious expansion comes amid a relative boom period for the data centre industry as demand for data storage rises, accelerated in part by the pandemic. "The pandemic has permanently changed behaviour. It has accelerated digitisation," Mr Smith said. "The pandemic has really become a catalyst. Our lives have become even more digital than they were before. I see that continuing."
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