Amazon Lines Up Mega Data Centres for Sydney, Melbourne

Online retail giant Amazon is making good on its promise to invest $13.2 billion building its Australian cloud computing business, unveiling plans for two new data centres—one south-west of Sydney and the other outside Melbourne.

Amazon Web Services has asked the NSW Government for planning secretary’s environmental assessment requirements (SEARs) to build and operate a 40mW data centre at 52 Turner Road, Smeaton Grange, about 50km south-west of Sydney’s centre.

The $50-million facility—which will include emergency backup generators, cooling plant, diesel and lithium-ion battery storage, a substation and associated infrastructure—will be the second data centre within the Smeaton Grange Industrial Park.

Amazon’s SYD52 data centre is at 42A Bluett Drive—less than 2km from the site of the proposed new facility.

Property records show Amazon paid $30.18 million for the 2.43ha Turner Road site in March of 2022. That’s more than four times what it paid for the similarly sized Bluett Street property about five years earlier.

The two data centres are part of a cluster of facilities known as AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, which launched in 2012.

Property development monitor BCI Central reports Amazon has plans for a $50-million data centre on a 13.2ha site at 54-80 Ferris Road, Cobblebank, about 40km west of Melbourne’s centre.

▲ Amazon’s robotic fulfilment centre at Goodman’s Oakdale West Industrial Estate in Western Sydney.

Amazon paid $60.5 million for the land in July last year, and while full details of the Victorian data centre are still to become clear, the facility will become part of the company’s second Australian cluster, the AWS Asia Pacific (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. It will support more than 2500 full-time equivalent jobs and contribute an estimated $15.9 billion in gross domestic product (GDP).

The fast uptake of artificial intelligence in all areas of industry and life has triggered a big increase in demand for cloud-based services in Australia and globally.

And whereas those data centres built in Australia in the past two years came with capacities of 20-30mW, or enough for cloud storage, those being planned in Sydney and Melbourne in the next 12 months, will have up to 10 times that capacity.