AI Powerhouse Rises From Telco Relic in Just Eight Months

Could this be Australia’s most sustainable data centre? GreenSquare has turned a 1990s telecommunications building in Sydney’s Norwest Business Park into its first data centre, retaining 92 per cent of the existing structural carbon. In a test case for the sector, it may well become a benchmark for more environmentally sound operations. The refit was completed in just eight months. The site was transformed to support high-density AI workloads, incorporating liquid-to-chip cooling and modern infrastructure designed for performance, efficiency and long-term reliability. GreenSquare said the project, dubed SYD1, showed how data centres could be developed with less disruption to surrounding communities, amid growing concerns about noise, pollution and other impacts associated with the sector’s rapid expansion. Chief technology officer Joshua Martens told The Urban Developer that the decision to keep the building was driven first by time, then by carbon. When speed is crucial For a new entrant such as GreenSquare, speed to market mattered. Martens said a larger, ground-up development would probably have pushed operational readiness to 2028. Keeping the shell also gave the company a head start on its sustainability roadmap, Martens said. “Structural carbon is such a difficult thing to engineer out,” he said. Reusing the existing structure meant GreenSquare could leverage what was already there. ▲ Chief technology officer Josh Martens with a rendering of a new build data centre GreenSquare is planning at Spotswood in Victoria. But the financial upside was modest, he said. “Generally the building shell is not the driving factor for the cost of data centres.” But the time savings were significant, “and with time comes some cost savings”. An independent assessment by engineering consultants TTW found that the adaptive reuse of SYD1 retained 92 per cent of the building’s existing structural carbon. The reuse of the existing structure, combined with low-carbon concrete, resulted in 76 per cent lower structural upfront carbon per square metre and 93 per cent lower carbon per kilowatt of IT capacity compared with a new-build facility. Stripping back, then flipping the building Modernising the building meant removing everything except the structural shell, Martens said, an approach he’s used on highrise buildings and data centres before. The original plan to reinforce the existing data hall didn’t survive due diligence. “It becomes fairly pointless to reuse an existing building if you’re putting that much additional carbon in to reinforce something,” Martens said. Instead, they remapped the entire building. The team moved office space to the old data hall floors, flipping the building’s use. As a result, IT capacity has increased by 275 per cent, which Martens described as “a very conservative number”. Comparing old and new is tricky, he said, because “in the 1990s, no one talked about megawatts”. Until about 2012, capacity was measured in racks. ▲ A rendering of the GreenSquare approved expansion at the Sydney site. Liquid cooling, less water The facility uses a liquid cooling system developed by NVIDIA that Martens said was designed to pack high-density computing capacity into a small footprint, while also achieving “quite good energy statistics”. GreenSquare secured a power upgrade, though Martens said the impact was relatively low given the facility’s size. Water was a different story. No upgrades were needed, and the site now uses less water than the original design, which relied on open-loop cooling towers. Those have been removed. “It was like trying to stay within the boundaries of what this building already had and not impact further,” he said. Global data centre investment is projected to reach $7 trillion by 2030 , with electricity demand growing by at least 20 per cent annually, according to NextDC data. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has forecast investment to reach $150 billion in Australia by 2030 , and $260 billion in the mid-2030s. Construction activity is expected to peak in the 2028-29 financial year. A known site, a lower risk profile Martens said the site’s history was part of the appeal. It was among the first buildings in the Norwest precinct when the area was redeveloped, and the site has neighbouring land to cater for extensions as part of a future uplift. “In the current climate, a site that had a historical use as a data centre … was definitely a lower risk profile for us,” he said. But Martens said it’s not a model that’s repeatable on every site, but more a case-by-case proposition. End users generally want bigger facilities, he said, but different customers have different needs. For this site, “the smaller it is, the lower the impact is”. Other industrial sites could work in principle, Martens said, and warehouses nearly all have strong slabs. But the harder problem is housing the plant, the cooling and electrical equipment, which Martens said was where other brownfield sites could struggle. ▲ Victoria has drawn a line around its surge in data centre development. A new framework is reshaping where the projects can go and how they are provisioned. Flexible design for many The facility is leased to a single tenant, NASDAQ-listed NVIDIA Cloud Partner Sharon AI, which will deploy about 8200 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs—a significant number for Australia. Martens said the were challenge for colocating providers. “To be able to put a development application in, do a design, make sure that design is flexible for 10 different customers with 10 different types of requirements and workloads … and procuring equipment speculatively, knowing that it has to be adaptable. “If you can nail that in the industry ... that’s the hard thing to do.” GreenSquare’s “malleable design”, he said, adapted quickly to different customers who are in talks with the company. Building out the pipeline GreenSquare’s pipeline across NSW and Victoria includes a proposed 240MW new-build project at Spotswood in Victoria, and an 80MW second stage at the SYD1 facility, which has been endorsed by the NSW Government’s Investment Delivery Authority. The company hopes to carry the sustainability story from this first building into its more greenfield sites, aiming to do “as best we can on water, energy and carbon”. Internal mandates, rather than tenant demand, are driving the sustainability push, he said. “We recognise now the pressure on the industry to be better players … it goes hand in hand now.” Martens said he hoped the project would help change how the sector is seen. “We’re hoping this is one facility we can be proud of and move on to the next, redefining what AI data centres look like.” He said buildings like this don’t need to be noisy or affect ground-level air quality . “They can actually be built in a way that has less impact on the surrounding community.”

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Taryn Paris
Fri 30 Oct 26

AI Powerhouse Rises From Telco Relic in Just Eight Months

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