Microsoft 6399 New Zealand, 79 per cent in American hands, won the consent to buy “non-urban” land from Neil Construction, 91 per cent Malaysian and the remainder Singaporean owned.
Approval was granted on February 8 but the consent notification has just been made public this afternoon.
Microsoft 6399 New Zealand is a New Zealand-registered company ultimately owned by Microsoft Corporation, with headquarters in Washington, the OIO noted.
Consent has been granted under the benefit to New Zealand pathway.
The OIO said the new data centre would support Microsoft’s existing centres already under construction.
“The investment will benefit New Zealand by introducing significant capital into New Zealand, including approximately $180 million of initial capital investment into this site, and by creating 50 new full-time equivalent jobs once the data centre on this site is operational plus 300 temporary full-time equivalent jobs during construction,” the decision said.
Tara Wylie of Simpson Grierson in Auckland was listed as the lawyer in the approval sheet.
Two years ago, the Herald reported Microsoft buying land to develop its $100 million-plus first New Zealand data centre in a move hailed last year by then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Property records show Microsoft New Zealand’s name on a site on Kakano Rd off Fred Taylor Dr, Westgate.
That was at the time a greenfields ex-horticultural land owned by Mark Gunton’s NZ Retail Property Group but being sold progressively in a multi-billion-dollar scheme spanning about 50ha beside the Northwestern motorway.
Microsoft has about 100 data centres worldwide.
The Herald’s Chris Keall also reported this year on the rise of new data centres.
Power-hungry “hyperscale” data centres have begun springing up around northwest Auckland. And more - many more - are on the way, he wrote.
Collectively, they’ll consume about 200 megawatts of electricity at peak use - roughly the amount required to power about 200,000 homes. For context, average demand in Auckland today is about 1700MW.
These are huge “server farms” for the “cloud” in cloud computing. The likes of Zoom or Microsoft 365, Fortnite or Netflix are served from a data centre.
Having giant data centres in Auckland - particularly northwest Auckland, close to the landing points of the major subsea cables that connect us to the outside world, and to New Zealand’s largest peering exchange for pointing the data in the right direction - means faster performance.
And for the likes of government agencies and banks, it smooths issues over data sovereignty - keeping New Zealand data in New Zealand. Previously, the closest hyperscale data centres have been in Sydney.
