Data Centres
DIGITAL LAND GRAB: DATA CENTRE REAL ESTATE MODEL SHIFTS GEAR
Author: Patrick Lauthu
The Urban Developer
With a digital gold rush under way, Australian governments are expediting data centre proposals while simultaneously trying to understand them.
Massive power and energy consumption make it difficult to find appropriate land for the hyper-scale server sheds. At the same time, the scale of capital pouring into AI means that sites are being snapped up and projects progressed at pace. But multi-billion dollar projects on urban industrial land may only be feasible for a few more years, and a variety of alternative approaches to siting a data centre are emerging. Barossa Green managing director Adrian Odorisio told The Urban Developer that finding the right location “is really a needs or requirements based selection”, with power, water, and telecommunications infrastructure chief among them.
practitioners, that will mean sharpening up the feasibility of data centre projects by locating them appropriately and building processes and contracts that provide communal benefit. Data journalist and OnlyFacts co-founder Juliette O’Brien, who is researching the locations and characteristics of data centres in Australia, told The Urban Developer that their urban locations fall into three main groups. “The middle of the city, where they’re as close as possible to the CBD; business parks which tend to be 10 to 15 kms from the city centre; and the greater city’s outer fringes. That third group is definitely growing,” O’Brien says. In March, the Commonwealth released a list of expectations for data centre proponents, including that they underwrite new renewable energy generation and pay for grid connections, while contributing to grid stability. Sustainable and responsible water use will also be demanded. However, those expectations have yet to be reified in concrete regulations. Meanwhile, the NSW Government has placed 15 data centre proposals worth a collective $51.9 billion on its Investment Delivery Authority pathway. That action comes while a NSW Data Centre Strategy is still under consultation, and a parliamentary inquiry into planning and regulating data centres is under way. O’Brien said that the average person would find it “mind-
“You will find areas that have most of the elements, but not all of them. You’ll have some areas where the elements are not as developed and require more infrastructure to be installed, which will change the returns on the project,” Odorisio says. “Looking for the community first is a way of getting the support for all the other aspects: the co-location of industry, the buyers for additional power. I’ve found that community-first approach is a real benefit.” As the sector matures, closer attention will be paid to the characteristics of the land on which a data centre sits, and how they interact with neighbouring land uses and the environment. For proponents, real estate agents and other property The NSW government has approved eight data centres worth a collective $10 billion over the past year.
O’Brien says that tracking the existence of data centres, let alone performance characteristics, is challenging under current planning regimes.
10 – April / May 2026
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