CDC Data Centres files for up to 1.4GW data centre campus in Wagga Wagga

CDC Data Centres has filed a SEARs application with the New South Wales government for a campus of up to four data centres on vacant land at 216 Ashfords Road, Gregadoo, about 11km south of the Wagga Wagga city centre and 455km southwest of Sydney. The operator, founded in 2007 and backed by Infratil, describes the project on its own website as an opportunity it is exploring, one that would supply secure data capacity to the Riverina and to New South Wales and put the region inside Australia's digital economy. That is a softer thing than a construction commitment, and the parcel, vacant land inside an established industrial and waste-management cluster on the city's south-eastern edge and more than 230km west of Canberra, sits well outside Sydney and Canberra, which is where the coverage of the filing puts CDC's usual hubs in the state.

The building plan is firmer than the intent. The 103.4-hectare site could hold up to four single-storey facilities of 47,275 sqm (508,865 sq ft) each, 189,325 sqm in total, roughly two million square feet, along with two on-site substations, and each building would carry 240MW of capacity in a phased build-out. Four buildings at that rating come to 960MW against a filed ceiling of up to 1.4GW, and the coverage does not say where the capacity above the 960MW of named buildings would sit. Two million square feet of floorplate would cover less than a fifth of the parcel, which is either land held for later phases or simply a site chosen generously for a first build, and the filing does not settle which.

The file's headline numbers are almost all ceilings: up to four buildings, up to 1.4GW, up to AU$15 billion, as many as 384 diesel generators, up to 13MW of rooftop solar, 240MW per building in a phased build. What is not conditional is the site's 103.4 hectares, the 189,325 sqm of floorplate across four buildings, the two substations and the 1.3km that would separate the campus from the new TransGrid Wagga Terminal Station.

That distance makes the terminal the piece of the project worth watching most closely. The campus would be grid-connected, and its own generation is small against the load the filing describes, since 13MW of rooftop solar is under 1% of a 1.4GW ceiling and the generators are there to cover outages rather than to run the site. Closed-loop cooling systems are planned to reduce water use, but nothing in the coverage substitutes for the transmission connection next door, which puts the timing of that connection ahead of land, capital and tenants in the order of things that decide when a 240MW first building energises.

The AU$15 billion (US$10.4bn) investment figure is attributed to the Wagga Wagga government rather than to the developer, and the coverage names no tenant, offtake counterparty or financing structure behind it. The city's existing compute is modest: Leading Edge DC, an Australian edge data centre operator, runs a small facility in Wagga Wagga. A campus of the scale described would be arriving into a market whose only named incumbent in the coverage is that one small site, with the headline money number supplied by local government rather than by a customer holding a contract.

CDC's own book is the yardstick for the ambition. The company has nearly 20 sites in operation and development across Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Auckland, more than 600MW of capacity in operation and development, 70MW of that in New Zealand, and a future development pipeline of a further 1.6GW out to 2034. A single Riverina campus at the ceiling of up to 1.4GW would approach the size of that entire eight-year pipeline, filed in one application rather than accumulated across four cities, and its first building alone, rated at 240MW, works out to roughly 40% of the capacity CDC currently reports in operation and development worldwide. The difference between the two figures is one of evidence: the 600MW and the 1.6GW are company numbers, and the Gregadoo capacity is a planning envelope whose status is an application, not an approval.

CDC's own framing of the project is civic — a Gregadoo facility would give the Riverina secure data capacity and a place in the national digital economy — and the filing's numbers are the only test of that claim available now. They describe a site whose first phase is a single 240MW building and whose ceiling is up to 1.4GW, a spread wide enough that the announcement's meaning depends entirely on how much of it is built. Land inside an industrial and waste-management cluster, 11km from the centre of a regional city, is a different proposition from farmland at the urban fringe for a project carrying two substations, up to 384 diesel generators and 189,325 sqm of floorplate; the coverage does not say what the surrounding uses are beyond the cluster the site sits in, how much adjoining land CDC holds, or who would occupy the buildings.

What follows is a state assessment and, behind it, a connection date. A first building rated at 240MW, a filed ceiling of up to 1.4GW and a new terminal station 1.3km away are the concrete facts that record will have to reconcile, and no tenant or financing structure appears in the coverage to reconcile them first.