From left: DCI Data Centres CEO Malcolm Roe, Digital Economy Minister David Clark and Brookfield managing director and DCI chairman Udhay Mathialagan at the sod-turning for DCI's $400m data centre campus in Albany. Photo / Jed Bradley
As a child growing up in Torbay, Malcolm Roe - now chief executive of DCI Data Centres - used to love trips to nearby Albany to buy fruit and veges from the orchards that used to dot the area.
"Now we'll be feeding data," he says, looking over the 5.8ha site that will host the "data centre campus" that his company will build in Albany.
And we're talking a lot of servers.
DCI - based in Sydney and owned by Canada's Brookfield Asset Management - plans to build facilities on the site that will house some 80,000 computer servers.
The Albany site until recently hosted a dozen giant greenhouses for Knights Nurseries - a firm, established by Ian and Lesley Knight (and later run by their children) that established itself on the land in the 1950s. Over time it became New Zealand's largest wholesale supplier to garden centres and cut-flower suppliers.
DCI bought the 5.8ha property from the Knight family for $66 million, the Herald understands.
The data centre campus is dubbed AK02.
DCI will operate at least two sites. The location of the other, AK01, has yet to be made public. Roe says the two sites will occupy a total 10ha.
Roe says AK02 is budgeted at $400m and AK01 at $200m - for a combined $600m in direct spending on land, construction, servers, staff and running costs. DCI puts the total project at $1.4 billion factoring in anticipated economic benefits as well.
Construction will involve around 150 jobs, with around 250 ongoing.
As has now been well-chronicled, New Zealand is about to go from no giant or "hyperscale" data centres on our soil to many, with announcements from tech giants Microsoft and Amazon Web Services and others about plans to build massive "server farms" in northwest Auckland - the better to address exploding demand for cloud computing as more of us work and play from home, using internet-based software (which, at the end of the day, has to sit on a physical server somewhere.)
All of the parties involved are playing their cards close to their chests, citing security and commercial sensitivities as they refuse to answer questions about co-location - but it's likely it will happen, to a degree, as is the case across the Tasman.
DCI provides what it calls a "wholesale white space" and "shell and core" services for cloud service providers. Will the firm be hosting AWS, Microsoft and perhaps another Big Tech peer on its AK02 Albany data centre campus? Roe can't confirm or deny - but close watchers of Overseas Investment Office documentation will have noted the same street address appearing on different providers' applications.
The Herald understands Vector has been keen on location-sharing at sites in Westgate, Whenuapai and Albany. The power company had a representative at DCI's Albany sod-turning ceremony on Friday - no surprise given each of those 80,000 servers will suck around 500 watts, even if not all will come online from day one.
Hyperscale-class data centres are described by their peak power usage. Roe says that all told, AKL02 will be a 40-megawatt facility - which, as things stand, would make it NZ's largest data centre .AKL01 will be a 10MW server farm.
Roe says his company will work with power providers to have 100 per cent renewable electricity - but he's open about the fact it will be all from the grid. Sticking a few - or even a lot - of solar panels on roofs in the new data centre campus would be good PR, but not meaningful in any practical sense, given the amount of power required.
"Even if we covered the whole 5.8 hectares in solar panels, that would only generate a tenth of the power required by AKL02," he says. "Lots of the solar panels you see on data centres are just window dressing."
And while DCI's operations announced so far will require a combined 50MW, Roe stresses that it will gradually scale up to full operation. Its first servers are due to come online in May next year, at AK01.
And he says that although they use huge amounts of power, the "hyperscale" data centre model is more efficient because it consumes less electricity overall than every business running its own servers in-house.
In a one-degree of separation scenario, DCI is 100 per cent owned by Brookfield, and Brookfield owns half of Vodafone NZ. Infratil owns the other half of Vodafone NZ and half of Canberra Data Centres (CDC), which is the most advanced of the hyperscale data centre operators currently setting up shop in NZ. Its Hobsonville and Silverdale facilities, budgeted at $300m-plus, are now near completion, with corporate groups touring through.
Vodafone NZ chief technology officer Tony Baird was on-hand for DCI's sod-turning. But nothing should be read into that. Spark's wholesale lead, Phil Newman, was also on hand and, like all major data centres, AK02 will work with a number of bandwidth providers for redundancy.
Housing data onshore is not new. Spark, Datacom and Catalyst already do it, among others.
But in his speech at the DCI sod-turning, Digital Economy Minister David Clark said his firm welcomed the new investments in "hyperscale" facilities, too.
"On-shore, hyperscale cloud will help the Government and New Zealand businesses to access the scale and security of cloud services in ways we haven't been able to before in this country," Clark said.
In the midst of a couple of blocks of abandoned glasshouses in Albany. Several this size pic.twitter.com/3t9YWfUXJJ
— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) August 4, 2022
"And we also want to be able to protect our data. Having it on-shore is something that's going to make a real difference for us. They [local data centres] give us stronger control over our data, which has a taonga value. We can store it here in Aotearoa where our laws and protections apply."
Roe added, "There is a performance advantage in having data centres here because the latency [lag] to secure your services is reduced as a result. So as the cloud matures, typically the cloud will move closer and closer to its consumers."
While the DCI chief executive declined to comment on customers who would be taking advantage of the Albany facility, Microsoft recently revealed that Auckland Transport would be an anchor customer for its first Auckland data centre (AT says the speed advantages over Singapore and Sydney-based data centres will see it rip out more in-house servers and move more apps to the cloud), while AWS numbers TVNZ and Netflix among the clients for its pending local server farm.
Roe can say more is on the way.
"I think Auckland and New Zealand are still quite undeserved for digital infrastructure and data centre capacity. We'll certainly be announcing further investment here in the coming few months," he says.
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