AirTrunk's Melbourne facility (AirTrunk)
Data centre start-up AirTrunk is set to build its biggest data centre on Australian soil in 2020.
The private equity-backed company has earmarked four hectares of land in north Sydney to build the 110 MW IT load facility.
According to the Australian Financial Review, AirTrunk secured more than $1 billion in funding to build the centre, its third in Australia and second in Sydney.
“AirTrunk’s new data centre in Sydney’s north and the expansion of our existing flagship facilities in Australia are the result of continued and strong customer demand for our proven hyperscale data centre solutions,” AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda said.
"We are uniquely positioned to offer the speed, scale, reliability and cost-efficiency that our customers need from their data centres now and into the future.”
Named SYD2, the centre will be hooked up to a 132kV substation and is said to be “well connected to telecommunications infrastructure”, as well as being embedded in Sydney’s cloud infrastructure region.
It will be positioned adjacent to AirTrunk’s two existing Australian data centres, SYD1 and MEL1, bringing a total of 370 MW across the three data centres.
Singapore-founded AirTrunk first cemented itself in Sydney with its flagship Australian data centre facility unveiled in September 2017, followed by one in Melbourne shortly after.
The start-up had secured $400 million from investment bank Goldman Sachs specifically to build out two flagship data centre sites in Australia – one in Melbourne and another in Sydney just eight months previously.
The Sydney 1 claimed 70MW of IT load and Melbourne 50MW of IT load when originally completed this time two years ago.
AirTrunk last year then completed an $850 million financing process to fund a "major expansion" of its Sydney and Melbourne data centres, reportedly its largest at the time.
“AirTrunk’s latest investment into its Australian data centres will bring significant benefits to the local economy and create hundreds of jobs during construction and throughout ongoing operations,” Khuda added.
