Australia Data Center Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

Australia Data Center Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The Australian data center market is estimated to register a CAGR of about 4.02 % during the forecast period. The increasing demand for cloud computing among SMEs, government regulations for local data security, and growing investment by domestic players are some of the major factors driving the demand for data centers in the country.​

Key Highlights

• Government initiatives like the Australia Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) are leading the way in optimizing data center resources with the introduction of the Australia Government Data Centre Strategy 2010-2025, and the strategy represents a transition from using government-run data centers to third-party, multi-tenant data centers.​
• The data center providers are also increasingly investing or adopting an acquisition strategy to expand their capacity. For instance, Metronode's data center assets acquisition by Equinix provided the company with additional capacity to capture the benefits of scale and adds approximately 20,000 square meters of gross colocation space to Equinix’s footprint in Australia.​
• There has been robust development of new data centers which use renewable energies. For instance, in March 2021, 3 data centers as part of Project Koete were proposed for Western Australia and Northern Territory from the Australian company Fibre Expressway. The tier IV standard data centers with an initial capacity of 20MW each are being constructed in partnerships with wind, solar, and long-term ocean and clean hydrogen providers to satisfy 100% renewable energy access over time. Such projects propel the market’s growth in Australia.
• There is a lot of concern about cybersecurity, especially when it comes to digital access and who can connect with a server and its data. Nevertheless, maintaining physical security might be quite difficult. Even in a secure environment, anyone with the necessary access can damage or utilize servers. Data centers need to be safeguarded against potential catastrophes like water leaks, fires, and cooling system failures, which are very expensive and restrict the growth of the Data Center market in the country.
• The recent COVID-19 outbreak has increased the demand for cloud computing in the country; hence, it has also expanded the scope of the data center market. The data center construction projects mostly continued as construction is classified as essential under the current Australian regime and is the vital sector to keep the country's economy running. However, the market also witnessed supply chain disruptions with the labor shortage, expecting a delay in the completion of several projects.

Key Market TrendsColocation is Expected to Account for a Significant Market Share

• The growing cloud computing and demand for edge computing provide a massive opportunity for the colocation service providers in the country. Colocation service providers are subsequently building out more on-ramps in major segments in the country to support a significant surge in demand from companies, making a more substantial move to the cloud. New and existing major on-ramps have so far allowed many enterprise workloads to effectively move out of on-premise locations and directly resituated in the cloud.​
• As edge computing is becoming more important to cloud users, especially in the rural region, demand for colocation services is further increasing. For example, the expansion of Equinix's second Melbourne data center, which cost AUD 23 million, has been completed. 500 more cabinets were added to the ME2 facility in Port Melbourne, bringing the total number of cabinets there to 1,500, with 4,070 square meters of colocation space. Over 8,200 square meters would eventually make up the data center, which would accommodate 3,000 cabinets.
• Colocation services are directly offered to business clients by operators like NEXTDC or Equinix, which also provide onshore facilities for cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Providers also runs its own physical data centers in addition to using onshore colocation services. They have been using a combination of Australian facilities they own and run, colocation provider-operated facilities, and international data centers to deliver the commercial services they provide.
• In September 2022, NextDC, an Australian data center company, intends to build a data center in Darwin, Northern Territory. The proposed D1 site has been anticipated to have a data center facility with a capacity of about 8MW across 3,000 sqm of the technical area and situated at 2 Harvey Street in Darwin's core business district. The 15 data halls would have 1,500 racks of space and offer colocation services.
• Australia is powered by 28 % renewable or green energy sources, with the remaining supplied by fossil fuels . This gives the country's colocation facilities significant opportunities to take advantage of green energy . In addition to green energy, data center consumers enjoy a range of PUE scores between 1.05 and 3.50, with the average PUE for Australian data centers sitting at 1 .56 .

Perth is to Witnesses a Significant Growth

• The growth of data centers in Perth is primarily aided by the resumption of previously announced projects, expansion of facilities, growth of cloud adoption, and the increased adoption of other technologies. Most of the demand for data center services is contributed by cloud-based service providers.
• The rapidly increasing adoption of various types of cloud services has been a crucial driver for the market’s growth. The companies are expanding their presence in the region For Instance In Feb 2022, AWS plans to expand its presence in Australia by opening two new Local Zones in Brisbane and Perth. AWS Local Zones employs an edge-computing architecture to place computation, storage, databases, and other services near big population centers at the cloud's edge. They're made to let clients use critical AWS services on-premises while outsourcing most of their workloads to AWS Regions.
• Further, in March 2021, Fibre Expressway Pty Ltd unveiled Project Koete, its USD 1.5 billion technology ecosystem in Western Australia and Northern Territory. The project is comprised of 10,000km subsea cable and three Tier IV data centers. It will provide data and internet connectivity between Perth and Darwin while offering additional onward connectivity to international business hubs in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, and beyond.
• In addition, The unnamed 16 fiber pair subsea cable will be a carrier-neutral system delivering high-speed, low-latency connectivity to the three data centers in Perth, Darwin, and Dampier. En route, it will connect seven cable landing stations (CLS) between Perth and Darwin.
• In August 2021, The P2 Perth Data Centre Project is a smart grid project located in Perth, Australi has started its operation. The installation began in 2018, and the project was completed in 2020. The smart grid technology category was used to finish the P2 Perth Data Centre Project. With a rated capacity of 20MW, it is an advanced grid infrastructure project. In addition, a P2 microsite has been created next to the future P2 Perth hyperscale plant, which will have a capacity of 20MW. The P2 microsite, which is being developed as NextDC's first edge data center, is a prefabricated, freestanding site within the compound where P2 is being built to give host interconnection services. In contrast, the main hyperscale is being built.

Competitive Landscape

The Australian data center market is competitive and fragmented as players are increasingly manufacturing new facilities in Australia, providing more offerings to end-users. Key players are NTT Communications Corporation and Equinix Inc.

• November 2021 - AirTrunk announced plans to build a new data center in Sydney that, at 320MW, would be the largest single hyperscale campus in the Asia Pacific (APAC) outside of China when fully operational. It will be built over nine phases, span 8.3 hectares, and will be served by an onsite 132KV substation. It will be designed to minimize carbon impact with a PUE of 1.15. AirTrunk touts SYD1 and SYD3 as its “Western Sydney Region,” which will offer over 450MW in total.
• November 2021 - Datacenter operator Canberra Data Centres (CDC) is set to expand its footprint in Australia with plans to enter the market in Melbourne through the construction of a 268MW facility. The facility will add 150MW of capacity to the company’s existing development initiatives, bringing the development and current operational capacity to 700MW. The company plans to have 13 data centers in operation by 2023.
• February 2021 - Australian Data Centres (ADC) selected Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud Customer to provide sovereign hosted cloud services to the Australian Federal Government. Hosted within Australian Data Centres’ state-of-the-art secure data center facility in Canberra, the Dedicated Region Cloud Customer will extend Oracle’s already broad services to government, particularly across secure workloads in National Security, Health, Human Services, and other departments and agencies dealing with the sensitive data of Australia and Australians.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support

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