Amazon’s investment into data centres in Australia is entering a new phase as it unveiled plans for two new mega-data centres, One will be located in the Smeaton Grange Industrial Park just over 50 kilometres south-west of the centre of Sydney. The second will be located at Cobblebank, around 40km north-west of Melbourne’s CBD.
Both projects are part of Amazon’s long term investment of $13.2 billion as it continues to establish the facilities necessary to support its Australian retail and cloud computing businesses particularly as demand for AI services in Australia drive up the capacity requirements for local data centres. Amazon established its AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012 and its AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region more recently at the beginning of 2023.
The proposed addition to the Smeaton Grange facility cluster will be located less than 2km from Amazon’s existing SYD52. The new data centre will cost around AU$50 million on a site purchased in 2022 for just over AU$30 million. In order to go forward, AWS has requested details of the necessary planning secretary’s environmental assessment requirements from the NSW Government. The facility will include key equipment and systems including emergency backup generators, cooling plant, diesel and lithium-ion battery storage, a substation and associated infrastructure.
Details of the Ferris Road, Cobblebank data centre are less clear. Amazon paid AU$60.5 million for the 13.2hs site in July 2023. It forms part of a total planned investment of AU$6.8 billion on the AWS Melbourne Region.
Amazon says the second AWS Region “will provide customers with even more options to run workloads with higher performance, greater flexibility and availability, securely store data in Australia, and serve end users with even lower latency.”
Amazon says it plans a total investment of $6.8 billion associated with the AWS Region in Melbourne. The company expects that the investment will create more than 2,500 full time equivalent jobs and contribute AU$15.9 billion to local GDP.
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