Australia’s ten largest data centres under construction
Renewmap’s May 2026 snapshot of Australian data-centre projects flags 19 sites under construction totalling 1,853 MW. The ten largest account for 1,671 MW, or 90% of the construction pipeline. They are heavily concentrated in two sub-markets — Sydney’s western and northern suburbs and Melbourne’s west — and are dominated by four operators: CDC (four sites), Stack and AirTrunk (two sites each on a combined-campus basis), and a single big build from each of NEXTDC, Stockland/EdgeConneX and Vantage.
What follows is a site-by-site summary, ordered by initial Renewmap capacity. The “initial MW” column reflects what is currently being built and corresponds to the Renewmap entry; “ultimate MW” is the master-plan envelope for the same campus once all phases land. Where the two differ materially I have followed the operator’s own disclosure rather than Renewmap, and flagged the discrepancy in the site write-up.
Table 1 — Top ten Australian data centres under construction, May 2026
| Rank | Site | Owner (ultimate parent) | Location | Initial MW | Ultimate MW |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AirTrunk SYD3 | AirTrunk (Blackstone + CPP Investments since Dec 2024) | Huntingwood, NSW | 400 | 400+ |
| 2 | CDC Laverton Campus Two | CDC (Infratil 49.75% / Future Fund 34.55% / CSC 12.04% / mgmt 3.66%) | Laverton North, VIC | 300 | n/a — sub-component of 400+ MW Laverton master plan |
| 3 | Stack MEL02 | Stack Infrastructure (IPI Partners → Blue Owl Capital, Jan 2025) | Truganina, VIC | 252 | 252 |
| 4 | Stockland Davis Road | Stockland / EdgeConneX (50:50 JV, March 2026) | Wetherill Park, NSW | 160 | 160 |
| 5 | CDC Laverton Campus One | CDC | Laverton North, VIC | 150 | n/a — sub-component of 400+ MW Laverton master plan |
| 6 | NEXTDC M3 (expansion) | NEXTDC Ltd (ASX:NXT) | West Footscray, VIC | 133* | 225 |
| 7 | CDC Eastern Creek 6 | CDC | Eastern Creek, NSW | 79† | EC5+6 = 108 MW IT load (CDC disclosure) |
| 8 | CDC Eastern Creek 5 | CDC | Eastern Creek, NSW | 79† | EC5+6 = 108 MW IT load (CDC disclosure) |
| 9 | Vantage MEL1 | Vantage Data Centers (DigitalBridge / Silver Lake) | Tullamarine, VIC | 64 | 64 advertised (3-building campus total) |
| 10 | Stack MEL01D | Stack Infrastructure (Blue Owl) | Truganina, VIC | 54 | 180 (full MEL01 campus, 4 buildings, A+B operating) |
* Renewmap’s 133 MW closely matches NEXTDC’s group-wide FY25 forward order book figure (133.9 MW). NEXTDC’s own site brochure carries 225 MW for the M3 campus master plan. Treat the 133 MW as forward-contracted capacity rather than M3-specific construction.
† CDC’s October 2022 announcement gave EC5+EC6 a combined 108 MW IT load. Renewmap’s 79 MW each (158 MW combined) is consistent with nameplate or connected MVA rather than deliverable IT MW. Use 108 MW as the IT-load figure.
Source: Renewmap.com.au accessed 2026-05-11; CDC, AirTrunk, Stack Infrastructure, NEXTDC, Vantage Data Centers, Stockland corporate disclosures.
1. AirTrunk SYD3 — 400 MW — Huntingwood, NSW
AirTrunk’s SYD3 sits on an 8.3-hectare site at 51 Huntingwood Drive, Huntingwood, in the Blacktown LGA roughly 30 km west of the Sydney CBD and about 1 km from AirTrunk’s existing SYD1 campus. AirTrunk bought the land from Endeavour Energy in November 2021 for A$110 million, which conveniently placed the build adjacent to Endeavour’s 132 kV network. The development consent is for a seven-storey, 123,000 m² facility with two on-site substations, 216 standby diesel gensets, 2,592 lithium-ion UPS cabinets and 86 water-cooled chillers, with a private 132/22 kV switchyard fed by dual Endeavour Energy 132 kV feeders. The original 2021 filing was for a 320+ MW IT load across nine phases; AirTrunk’s current SYD3 product page advertises “400+ MW” across 42 data halls, consistent with the Renewmap figure but reflecting an August 2024 master-plan upsizing that AirTrunk did not itemise publicly.
AirTrunk has been owned by Blackstone (with CPP Investments as a minority partner) since the A$24 billion privatisation closed in late 2024, and customer-level disclosure has thinned materially since. The historical anchor tenants across AirTrunk’s Australian platform are the global hyperscalers — Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta — but SYD3-specific tenant attribution is no longer public. On power, AirTrunk reports portfolio-level renewables sourcing of around 80% across the Australian fleet through corporate PPAs, but does not allocate volumes to individual campuses; no site-specific PPA has been announced for SYD3. The nine PPAs signed in April 2026 (430 MW, eight with co-located BESS, with developers including OX2, X-ELIO, Anza, TagEnergy and European Energy) are AWS-counterparty contracts, not AirTrunk contracts, so any read-through that they back SYD3’s load is speculative.
2. CDC Laverton Campus Two — 300 MW — Laverton North, VIC
CDC broke ground at 20-38 Leakes Road, Laverton North on 17 February 2025, marketing the combined Laverton development as a A$2.7 billion build. Renewmap splits the site into Campus One (150 MW) and Campus Two (300 MW), but CDC’s own messaging treats Laverton as a single campus with a master-plan envelope of “over 400 MW”, taking the combined Victorian fleet (Brooklyn 355 MW operational + Laverton 400+ MW) to “780+ MW” or “more than 800 MW”. The Renewmap 150/300 split reads as a phasing breakdown of that master plan rather than two physically distinct sites — CDC has not separately marketed “Campus Two” with its own address, anchor or commissioning date. Wyndham City Council records show planning application WYP14790/24 lodged in early October 2024 and a follow-up earthworks permit WYP14905/24 in December 2024, consistent with a sequenced multi-stage build.
Powercor’s 2024 Mt Cottrell Non-Network Options Screening Report explicitly flags the Laverton-area data centre load as anticipated to be supplied out of Deer Park Terminal Station (an AusNet/AEMO Declared Shared Network terminal station), with capacity augmentation already in scope. Powercor is the host DNSP; AusNet owns the upstream transmission. No PPA has been disclosed, and CDC’s standard pattern is grid-supplied power with redundancy rather than self-generation. On customers, CDC’s portfolio carries the Australian Government Hosting Certification Framework “Certified Strategic” status that is required to host classified workloads up to Top Secret — so a Defence or Federal Government anchor remains plausible — but at 300 MW Campus Two is more naturally sized for a US hyperscaler build-to-suit or AI tenant. None has been confirmed publicly. Customers named at CDC’s February 2026 Brooklyn opening (Nvidia, Firmus, Deakin University, Monash University) suggest the Victorian fill leans more toward AI and enterprise than the classified-government workload that anchors CDC’s Canberra Hume campus.
3. Stack MEL02 — 252 MW — Truganina, VIC
Stack’s MEL02 occupies a 5.6-hectare footprint at 200 Palmers Road, Truganina, immediately across the road from Stack’s existing MEL01 campus on the western fringe of metropolitan Melbourne. It is structured as a single 21,000 m² technical building marketed at 252 MW of IT capacity, served by a dedicated on-site 132 kV utility substation with gross capacity of 300+ MW — the connection has been sized with headroom beyond the advertised IT load. The 132 kV connection hands over into the Powercor distribution area, with AusNet’s Deer Park terminal station providing the upstream transmission backbone. DataCenterDynamics reported the building “completion of construction” in late 2025, suggesting the structure is up; the Baxtel listing carries a 2026 in-service target, consistent with a multi-year electrical and mechanical fit-out behind a topped-out shell.
The ownership chain matters here and is often misreported: Stack was formed in 2019 by IPI Partners (a JV of ICONIQ Capital and Iron Point Partners), Blue Owl Capital (NYSE: OWL) agreed to acquire IPI Partners in October 2024, and the deal closed on 6 January 2025. Bloomberg reported in early May 2026 that Blue Owl is now exploring a sale of Stack’s Asia-Pacific portfolio (Australia, Japan, Malaysia) at a valuation north of US$30 billion. Brookfield, despite being widely cited in older Australian coverage, is not in Stack’s ownership chain. No anchor tenant has been disclosed for MEL02 and Stack markets it as build-to-suit hyperscale; the only confirmed global Stack anchor relationship is Microsoft, with no Australia-specific confirmation. No PPA has been disclosed.
4. Stockland Davis Road — 160 MW — Wetherill Park, NSW
The Davis Road site sits at 2 Davis Road, Wetherill Park (Fairfield LGA), on the footprint of Stockland’s existing 44,600 m² Reservoir Road distribution centre. Stockland is the proponent — confirmed in the NSW Investment Delivery Authority list released in March 2026, which named three Stockland NSW projects (Davis Road, “Stockland Fife” at Kemps Creek for 168 MW, and “Project A” in the City of Ryde at the M_Park/Macquarie Park precinct). The earlier 2024 State Significant Development application, lodged under the “Project Blue Tongue” code name and prepared by Cundall Johnston & Partners as designer, corresponds to this site: two three-storey data halls of 80 MW each (66 MW IT load apiece, totalling ~132 MW IT load on the 160 MW gross figure), a two-storey tape building, an on-site Transgrid substation (implying a transmission rather than distribution-network connection), 33 standby diesel gensets per building, and direct-evaporative cooling without mechanical chillers in the data halls.
The structural news at this site is the 50:50 capital and operating partnership Stockland announced with US hyperscale operator EdgeConneX on 3 March 2026. Stockland brings the land, planning approvals and balance sheet; EdgeConneX brings operating expertise from its 80-plus facilities across 20+ countries. So Stockland is the landowner and joint owner, but not the operator — EdgeConneX will run Davis Road. CEO Tarun Gupta has flagged a five-year capital allocation of 5-10% of group capital (roughly A$750 million to A$1.5 billion) to the platform across the three NSW sites plus a 250 MW Melbourne campus already filed. Davis Road’s master plan appears capped at 160 MW total across the two buildings; the company scales toward 450 MW NSW only by stacking Kemps Creek and Macquarie Park on top. No anchor tenant has been disclosed and no PPA arrangement announced — both are likely to follow EdgeConneX’s customer relationships. Construction completion is currently flagged for 2027.
5. CDC Laverton Campus One — 150 MW — Laverton North, VIC
Campus One shares the 20-38 Leakes Road site with Campus Two and is described by CDC as the initial 150 MW phase of the broader Laverton build-out. Power, network operator and grid-connection arrangements are identical to Campus Two — Powercor DNSP, AusNet transmission, Deer Park Terminal Station supply. There is no separate anchor disclosure. CDC’s broader Victorian customer mix (named at the February 2026 Brooklyn opening) includes Nvidia, Firmus and major universities, but specific Laverton One tenancy has not been publicly attributed. Given typical CDC phasing, Campus One is likely to come online first and absorb the early-mover enterprise/government and AI customer demand, with Campus Two reserved for a larger hyperscale or AI build-to-suit commitment whose customer identity has not yet been disclosed.
6. NEXTDC M3 — 133 MW (expansion) — West Footscray, VIC
NEXTDC’s M3 sits on 10 hectares at 25 Indwe Street, West Footscray, assembled in two land tranches (an original 6 hectares from CostaFox in 2020, plus an additional 4.19 hectares at 1-13 Paramount Road and 39 Indwe Street acquired in 2021 for A$24 million). The site brochure now describes M3 as a 225 MW Tier IV facility with more than 41,000 m² of technical space and 23,000 racks. NEXTDC’s FY25 results (28 August 2025) flagged M3’s planned capacity as “upsized by 50 MW to 200 MW”; the current site page carries 225 MW, suggesting another quiet upsizing post-FY25. The original 2021 planning consent was for 150 MW. Renewmap’s 133 MW closely matches NEXTDC’s group-wide FY25 forward order book (133.9 MW) — treat it as forward-contracted capacity, not strictly M3-specific construction. M3 sits adjacent to a Powercor zone substation; NEXTDC’s 2021 land-acquisition announcement explicitly cited “proximity to a major electricity substation” as the rationale. AusNet’s West Melbourne terminal provides the upstream transmission feed.
M3 is the only one of the ten sites with a publicly named AI anchor: Sharon AI (NASDAQ-listed, originally a US neocloud) announced a 50 MW expansion lease in November 2025, on top of an existing footprint, and is deploying a 1,000-GPU NVIDIA B200 cluster with Lenovo and VAST Data; the contract can scale to over 20,000 GPUs. No site-specific PPA counterparty has been disclosed for M3, although NEXTDC carries Climate Active carbon-neutral certification across all its sites and has a 100% renewables target by 2030, sourced via a mix of corporate PPAs and offsets. Microsoft Azure has historically been heavily co-located across NEXTDC’s portfolio, but NEXTDC does not publicly name cloud customers.
7. CDC Eastern Creek 6 — 79 MW — Eastern Creek, NSW
EC6 sits at 17 Roberts Road, Eastern Creek, on the 15-hectare campus CDC bought from Hewlett-Packard in December 2018. The campus is around 500 m from TransGrid’s Sydney West 330/132 kV Bulk Supply Point at 200 Old Wallgrove Road — one of the strongest grid connection points in Western Sydney — and the original Eastern Creek SSD application lodged a 157.2 MVA Endeavour Energy load supply via two 132 kV underground feeders from Sydney West. That is an unusually direct transmission interface for a distribution-network customer. EC6 and EC5 were announced together in October 2022 as a A$1 billion expansion adding a combined 108 MW IT load on top of the existing 123 MW EC1-EC4 footprint, taking the operational campus toward 230 MW. Renewmap records EC6 at 79 MW, which combined with EC5’s 79 MW gives 158 MW gross — larger than CDC’s announced 108 MW IT load, consistent with Renewmap reporting nameplate or connected MVA rather than deliverable IT MW.
EC5 and EC6 share a 46,182 m² building plate across two two-storey buildings with two data-hall levels each. A NSW Planning Portal application dated 2 August 2024 sought approval for early works to level 03, consistent with an active build. CDC’s Eastern Creek campus is “Certified Strategic” under the Hosting Certification Framework and serves “enterprise and Government clients”; the AusTender record shows Defence Department contracts with CDC cumulatively exceeding A$1 billion over the past decade. No site-specific anchor has been disclosed for EC6.
8. CDC Eastern Creek 5 — 79 MW — Eastern Creek, NSW
EC5 is the paired build with EC6 and shares the same Endeavour Energy / Sydney West BSP connection, the same Certified Strategic status, and the same combined building plate. The 79 MW Renewmap figure should be read as part of the 108 MW IT load that CDC has publicly disclosed for the EC5+EC6 pair. There is no separately disclosed anchor; the build is speculative against CDC’s government and “national critical infrastructure” customer base, with optionality for hyperscale or AI tenancy as the broader Australian market shifts toward those workloads. The larger 504 MW Marsden Park campus (NSW State Significant Development approved November 2025) is the more natural landing zone for CDC’s next major hyperscale commitment.
9. Vantage MEL1 — 64 MW — Tullamarine, VIC
Vantage’s MEL1 sits on a 7-acre site at 45 Tullamarine Park Road, Tullamarine, about 6 km south of Melbourne Airport. Vantage launched its APAC platform in 2022 under DigitalBridge and Silver Lake backing, with this site as its first Australian build. The published capacity is 64 MW of critical IT load across 25,000 m² and three multi-storey buildings; secondary trackers (datacentermap.com) report 48 MW for the first building, but Vantage’s own product page is the cleaner figure. The 64 MW reads as the total campus IT load across all three buildings rather than a first-stage figure — Vantage has not disclosed a larger ultimate master plan for MEL1, although it has flagged a separate second Melbourne site.
Power comes from an on-campus N+1 66 kV substation supplied by Jemena — Tullamarine sits in Jemena’s distribution area, distinct from the Powercor footprint on Melbourne’s west and south-west. Jemena’s January 2025 AER submission flagged Tullamarine as a focus area for greenfield zone substation development for 30-300 MVA data centre customers, consistent with the broader trend of network operators planning around hyperscale loads. MEL1 is specifically marketed for AI workloads with hybrid chilled-water cooling and air-side economisers. Vantage targets net-zero by 2030 and references on-site solar PV. No anchor tenant has been disclosed, and the site is still under construction with most sources targeting a 2026 commissioning date.
10. Stack MEL01D — 54 MW — Truganina, VIC
MEL01D is the fourth and final building of Stack’s 180 MW MEL01 campus at 399 Palmers Road, Truganina (directly across Palmers Road from MEL02 at 200). The MEL01 campus is structured as four discrete data halls: MEL01A and MEL01B (36 MW each, occupancy permits issued August 2023, both operating) and MEL01C and MEL01D (54 MW each, both currently in vertical construction; Hickory hosted the MEL01C+D topping-out ceremony in November 2025). The campus is served by an on-site 66/11 kV utility substation rated at 135 MW total — so MEL01D’s 54 MW is being delivered within the existing campus substation envelope rather than via a fresh transmission connection. Powercor is the host DNSP for Truganina; AusNet’s Deer Park terminal is upstream.
A subtle point on the Renewmap snapshot: only MEL01D appears at 54 MW. MEL01C, also 54 MW and also under construction in parallel, does not appear as a separate line — so Renewmap may understate the under-construction MEL01 footprint by 54 MW. Stack secured an A$1.3 billion green financing facility on 23 July 2025 (with Deutsche Bank, MUFG, Natixis, OCBC and Société Générale as MLAs) explicitly to accelerate the MEL01 expansion, so MEL01C and MEL01D will likely commission in close sequence. Microsoft is the only confirmed global Stack anchor; no Australian-specific tenant has been formally disclosed.
Observations across the ten sites
A few things stand out from this top-ten cut.
The pipeline is bicoastal but really just bi-suburb. Of the 1,671 MW under construction in the top ten, NSW accounts for 797 MW across just two suburbs (Huntingwood/Wetherill Park in western Sydney and Eastern Creek), and VIC accounts for 874 MW across two suburbs (Laverton North/Truganina in Melbourne’s west, plus West Footscray and Tullamarine within the same broader north-west arc). Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra are absent from this list entirely. The state-level reading of the data masks how spatially concentrated the build actually is — and how concentrated the consequent transmission stress will be on Deer Park Terminal Station (VIC) and Sydney West BSP (NSW).
The “Renewmap MW” figure isn’t a clean IT load number. Three different mismatches show up across the ten sites: (i) at CDC Eastern Creek, Renewmap’s 158 MW combined runs ahead of CDC’s announced 108 MW IT load — Renewmap looks to be reporting nameplate MVA; (ii) at NEXTDC M3, Renewmap’s 133 MW closely tracks the group forward-order-book figure rather than the M3-specific 225 MW master plan; (iii) at Stack MEL01, only MEL01D is on the list — MEL01C, also under construction at 54 MW, is missing. For headline construction-pipeline arithmetic, treat the Renewmap totals as an order-of-magnitude indicator, not as a deliverable IT-load figure.
Anchor tenant disclosure is sparse. Only NEXTDC M3 has a publicly named hyperscale-style anchor — Sharon AI for 50 MW with a 1,000-GPU B200 cluster scaling toward 20,000 GPUs. Everywhere else, the customer side of the build is either NDA-shielded (typical for hyperscale single-tenant builds) or, in CDC’s case, drawn from a government and Certified-Strategic-eligible enterprise pool that the operator does not name. AirTrunk’s customer disclosure in particular has become thinner since the Blackstone privatisation. The implication for Australian-energy-narrative purposes is that the demand-side counterparty for most of this construction MW is not visible from public sources, so claims about who is driving the build (US hyperscalers? domestic government? AI start-ups?) are hard to ground.
PPA backing is thin, AWS-side rather than operator-side. The April 2026 AWS announcement of nine PPAs and 430 MW (eight with co-located BESS) is the biggest renewables/storage commitment in the recent record. But those are AWS-counterparty contracts that back AWS’s hyperscale load wherever it lands — they are not directly attributable to any of the ten construction projects above. Of the operators themselves, AirTrunk reports portfolio-level ~80% renewable sourcing across the Australian fleet (no site-level allocation), and NEXTDC carries Climate Active carbon-neutral certification across all sites (via a mix of corporate PPAs and offsets). No site-specific operator-side PPA has been disclosed for any of the ten projects.
Ownership has churned at three of the four largest operators. AirTrunk went private under Blackstone in late 2024 (with CPP Investments as minority); Stack passed from IPI Partners to Blue Owl in January 2025 and may transact again at the APAC level in 2026; CDC’s shareholder register was rewritten in May 2025 when Infratil and the Future Fund collectively bought out part of the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation stake at an implied A$13.7bn equity value. NEXTDC remains the only ASX-listed pure-play. The concentration of major builds under private rather than public ownership means corporate-disclosure quality on power source, anchor tenancy and master-plan capacity will continue to deteriorate — Renewmap and the AER/AEMO connection register are increasingly the binding constraint on what is knowable.
Open items for further work
- Confirm IT load vs nameplate MVA at each site by cross-checking against the AEMO connection register and AusNet/Powercor/Endeavour connection applications. The CDC Eastern Creek discrepancy (108 MW IT vs 158 MW Renewmap) suggests a system-wide pattern.
- Transmission interconnection costs and contingent project applications for Deer Park Terminal Station (VIC) and Sydney West BSP (NSW) — these are the binding nodes for the western-suburb construction concentration in both states.
- The Stockland-EdgeConneX JV terms — what does EdgeConneX bring beyond operating know-how? The 50:50 split implies meaningful capital alongside Stockland’s; the deal is fresh (3 March 2026) and full economics have not been published.
- The Sharon AI / NEXTDC M3 deal — first publicly named GPU-tenant build-to-suit in Australia at scale; the 1,000 → 20,000 GPU scaling pathway and how the underlying power and cooling design accommodates B200 → next-generation hardware swaps over the lease term.
- The Marsden Park 504 MW SSD approval (CDC, Nov 2025) — not yet under construction so not in this list, but the next-cohort hyperscale build to watch in NSW.
Source: Renewmap.com.au accessed 2026-05-11; CDC corporate disclosures and February 2026 Brooklyn opening; AirTrunk corporate website (SYD3 product page Nov 2021 announcement and Aug 2024 expansion notice); Stack Infrastructure corporate website and 23 July 2025 green financing release; Stockland 3 March 2026 ASX release; Allens client advisory on the EdgeConneX partnership; NEXTDC FY25 Full Year Results Presentation (28 August 2025) and M3 site brochure; Vantage Data Centers Melbourne product page; Hickory Group MEL01C+D topping-out announcement (November 2025); Sharon AI press release (November 2025); Infratil investor releases (February and May 2025); Blue Owl Capital IPI acquisition completion notice (6 January 2025); NSW Government Investment Delivery Authority pipeline list (March 2026); Wyndham City Council planning portal (WYP14790/24, WYP14905/24); NSW Major Projects Portal (SSD-10330); Jemena AER Network Development Strategy submission (31 January 2025); Powercor Mt Cottrell Non-Network Options Screening Report (2024); industry press: DataCenterDynamics, AFR, ITNews, iTWire, Capacity Magazine, w.media, The Urban Developer.