Our biggest investment ever – Sydney Data Centre Intellicentre 3

This week, we announced our investment in Intellicentre 3 (IC3), our new purpose-built 33 megawatts (MW) data centre in Sydney in the suburb of Macquarie Park. When combined with our existing 10MW Intellicentre 2 (IC2) facility, forms a massive 43MW Sydney data centre campus footprint.

The investment will be completed in phases, with the first phase being a $75-80 million investment.

Why such a large investment?

It will come as no surprise, but building a data centre doesn’t come cheap. Particularly when built to the scale, quality and efficiency of IC3 (we are building to a PUE of 1.28).

We’ve built up a good understanding over the last 18 years of running large scale data centres in Australia. What makes a great one and what customers need. Because when we built Intellicentre 1 (2001), the understanding we had was not well recognised among our industry peers. The cloud as we know it today didn’t exist, and enterprises and government organisations were in a wasteful routine of building more and more computer rooms in their offices.

We knew that this routine didn’t make sense and that the Australian data centre market was ripe for rapid disruption. And the consistent data centre success we’ve earned over the past 18 years shows we were right.

IC3 continues that journey, while also acknowledging that the following data centre needs of customers are still changing and rapidly escalating;

• government agencies of all levels (and physical security zoning requirements that will support the highest government data classifications);
• global cloud providers and hyperscalers; and
• Australian businesses

Organisations need huge capacity and always-on availability to cope with demand on their specific architectures and security needs. IC3 will meet this new demand and support geographical diversity across Sydney (Intellicentre 1, 2, 3) and Canberra (Intellicentre 4 Bunker).

A big thank you.

Firstly, and often overlooked by many companies, a thank you to our existing data centre customers across Intellicentre 1, 2 and 4. Thank you for choosing Macquarie and in turn supporting our growth, and now reinvestment into more capacity.

Thank you team, especially all those within Macquarie as well as our lead engineering consultants at Paul’s Hurley Palmer Flatt (HPF) and in particular local head Dan Pointon. Ultimately, investments of this scale don’t come without the support and domain expertise of such brilliant minds.

Practical completion of the Sydney Data Centre IC3 is expected in late 2019.

Media coverage here. More information from Macquarie itself here.