As power and land become increasingly hard to find for data centre operators, Western Australia is gaining attention as a potential future hub for the industry.
Speaking at a data centre event in Singapore recently, Cushman & Wakefield’s Data Centre Advisory Team lead for Australia Alex Moffatt said data centre operators and their clients were increasingly placing sustainability metrics on data centre operations, leading to growing demand for greener power options. He said Western Australia’s multiple existing and planned subsea cables, fibre optic connectivity, significant renewable power resources (10GW+) and abundant land made it an ideal location for a data centre hub with the potential to serve both Asian and African markets.
“Western Australia has substantial wind and solar energy opportunities as well as existing energy infrastructure thanks to its history as a mining state,” Moffatt said. “Perth also has several green hydrogen projects in the planning stages which would generate energy and allow energy storage at scale. Data centres, with their large, stable power requirements, provide the demand certainty to enable clean energy projects to progress from planning to delivery stages.”
A spokesperson from the Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science and Innovation , said data centres played an important role in the state’s future.
“Western Australia has traditionally been a strong mining and energy state, and the government is heavily focused on transitioning to a diversified economy that meets future needs. The WA Government is supportive of data centres and investment into projects that support diversified activities in Western Australia and help to unlock our renewable energy potential.”
The State Government has earmarked around AUD $3.8 billion for investment into green power infrastructure in the coming years, with $22.5 million committed to help streamline approvals for green energy proposals.
As at June 30, Perth had 16 data centres, with 33MW of operational capacity and 53MW either planned or under construction. Sydney, one of Asia Pacific’s leading data centre markets, had 47 data centres, with 770MW in operation and a further 1,224MW of planned and construction pipeline.
The data centre sector is being driven by increasing demand for AI and compute power. New builds have increased in scale from between 20MW and 50MW three years ago, to between 100MW and 200MW, with some up to 500MW and plans by hyperscalers for 1GW data centres.
Finding the land and power to match this scale was becoming increasingly rare, said Moffatt. “In most markets, it is difficult to find 100 hectares of land. Not in Western Australia.”
The Singapore Solution
While Singapore remains a leading data centre hub globally, the 730-square-kilometre city-state imposed a moratorium on data centres in 2019 and has tightly controlled new capacity since it was lifted in 2022. Despite an announcement earlier this year to unlock another 300MW of data centre capacity, demand is still expected to outstrip supply.
The two countries signed the Singapore-Australia Digital Economy Agreement (SADEA) in 2020, a collection of MOUs around artificial intelligence, personal information protection, trade facilitation, digital identities and consumer protections, among others. The agreement creates opportunities for strategic data sharing, and the possibility of making Western Australia an alternative hub for non-critical data centres.
