Australian-owned and operated company Hickory Data Centres has broken ground on its Truganina site in Melbourne, which is set to house a 72-megawatt hyperscale facility made up of two 36-megawatt diverse buildings and 18 data halls.
June last year the company announced plans to launch a data centre and build a 36 MW facility at the Truganina site in west Melbourne. The facility, which was to be located on a 3.5 hectare site, was to have an area of 25,000 square meters. m (269,000 sq ft) in 12 data rooms
The Truganina site was acquired in early 2021, with the data centre set to meet the specific design, scalability and security requirements of leading cloud and content providers with availability from the fourth quarter of 2022.
At the time of the original announcement, company director Michael Argyrou of Hickory Data Centres told the Australian Financial Review that the first project is a tenantless self-financed specification build, but was confident of filling the space quickly.
At the same time, Hickory Data Centres is also expanding to Canberra.
Joel O’Halloran, Chief Executive Officer of Hickory Data Centres, said: “We are thrilled to be breaking ground on our Truganina site in Melbourne as the strategic expansion of Hickory Data Centres comes to fruition. These locations will bring substantial capacity to the growing Australian market, with Melbourne one of the hottest markets in the world right now for data centre investment.”
According to a 2021 report by Structure Research, Melbourne’s data centre market is expected to reach US $1.1bn by 2026 with a 20.6 per cent compound annual growth rate specific to hyperscale.
Hickory has also reportedly acquired a plot of 24,000 m2 (258,300 square feet) in Canberra and plans to build a 28 MW hyperscale data center there.
Hickory Data Centres offers a unique approach to its facilities, with a vertically integrated model as both a construction business and data centre service provider, which allows the company to develop, build, and operate purpose-built hyperscale data centres on behalf of major global clients.
The Truganina data centre is expected to be operational by the end of 2022 with “the specific design, scale and security requirements of the major cloud and content providers”.
