Goodman Group has lodged plans for a 500 MW data centre campus at Eastern Creek in western Sydney, signalling a potential AUD 5 billion investment as competition intensifies for power, land and approvals in Australia’s largest data centre market.
The company has filed an environmental assessment with the New South Wales government for a large-scale data centre campus in western Sydney. The proposed development, known as Project Atlas, would see Goodman redevelop its existing Coles national distribution centre site at Eastern Creek into a facility with up to 500 MW of power capacity.
According to the planning documents, Project Atlas would comprise two data centre buildings with a combined gross floor area of approximately 27,800 square metres. While relatively modest in physical footprint, the project is notable for the scale of power being proposed, placing it among the largest data centre campuses currently under consideration in Australia. Goodman has not yet disclosed a construction timeline for Project Atlas.
The Eastern Creek site sits close to the intersection of the M4 and M7 motorways, an area that is rapidly emerging as a major data centre cluster. Nearby developments include a 200 MW campus operated by CDC, as well as NextDC’s S7 site, where NextDC and OpenAI are planning a large-scale GPU-focused hyperscale facility, subject to approvals. That project has an initial delivery target in the second half of 2027.
Further west, additional capacity is already in the pipeline. Starwood Capital Group, in partnership with Doma Infrastructure Group and Telstra, has secured development approval for a 62 MW hyperscale-ready facility at Minchinbury, with construction scheduled to begin in early 2026. Taken together, the projects highlight the extent to which western Sydney has become the focal point for Australia’s next wave of hyperscale and AI-oriented data centre investment.
Project Atlas would significantly expand Goodman’s data centre presence in Sydney. In April last year, the group announced Project Mars, a 90 MW data centre campus at the Transtech Business Park in Sydney’s north-west, with an estimated investment of AUD 1.2 billion. The proposed scale of Project Atlas dwarfs that earlier development and underlines Goodman’s ambition to establish itself as a major player in the region’s digital infrastructure market.
The move comes as demand for data centre capacity in Sydney continues to be driven by cloud adoption, enterprise digitalisation and, increasingly, AI workloads with high power density requirements. Securing access to large, contiguous power allocations has become one of the defining challenges for developers, particularly in constrained urban markets.
Global platform
The Sydney filing also comes against the backdrop of a broader international expansion of Goodman’s data centre platform. In Europe, the group has recently signed an agreement with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to establish a AUD 14 billion (EUR 8 billion) European data centre partnership, marking CPP Investments’ first dedicated data centre vehicle in the region. The 50/50 partnership involves an initial AUD 3.9 billion (EUR 2.2 billion) capital commitment and targets developments in Europe’s core FLAP markets.
The initial European portfolio comprises four projects in Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam, totalling 435 MW of primary power and 282 MW of IT load. All sites have secured power connections and planning approvals, with site infrastructure works substantially progressed, enabling construction starts by 30 June 2026. Goodman Group CEO Greg Goodman (above) has described the portfolio as rare in both scale and quality, citing the scarcity of powered land in Tier 1 European markets as cloud and AI demand accelerates.
Together with its recently established Hong Kong-focused data centre investment vehicle, the European partnership highlights the extent to which Goodman is scaling its data centre activities globally.