AirTrunk invests $1b plus into north Sydney data centre
Private-equity-backed data centre start-up AirTrunk is set to launch one of its biggest single facilities yet, with an investment into a north Sydney operation to rise past $1 billion.
Dubbed SYD2, the facility is set to open in 2020 and will eventually deliver more than 110 MW of IT load over four hectares of land.
To support that effort, the facility will be hooked up to a dedicated 132kV substation, to enable reliable power infrastructure at lower electricity rates for its customers.
The facility is located in major cloud availability zones in Sydney’s north and is well connected to telecommunications infrastructure.
The investment into north Sydney will be done progressively and consolidates AirTrunk’s already rapid roll-out, with about $1.3 billion deployed over the past two years.
Founder and chief executive Robin Khuda said AirTrunk’s growth came on the back of the rapidly expanding demand of players such as Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Oracle and Microsoft.
“There is more and more data moving to the cloud. On top of that there is all of the machine learning, AI, the internet of things,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
“We have a pretty good line of sight on how our customers are growing. They want to expand at the same facility for a long time. That’s why we play the scale game. It gives them significant cost efficiency.”
AirTrunk has also acquired land next to two existing data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, which will enable both campuses to expand to 130-plus MW of IT load each, bringing its total Australian capacity to more than 370 MW across the three data centres.
Owned by Mr Khuda, Goldman Sachs’ Special Situations Group and TPG Sixth Street Partners (TSSP), AirTrunk is expanding into the Asian market as well. It is developing a 60MW data centre in Singapore, while a Hong Kong hub is set to open late next year.
Tokyo is next, with Mr Khuda and his team already busy scouring potential sites there.
“Tokyo is by far the biggest market in Asia. This is the market we want to be in,” he said.
