Datagrid plans huge Southland data centre

Hawaiki team behind the project

Hawaiki Cable founder Remi Galasso and CallPlus entrepreneur Malcolm Dick are behind plans for a $700 million data centre in Southland.

The project will include two new submarine cables. A 2900km submarine cable system will connect Invercargill to Sydney and Melbourne. This will give New Zealand a fifth international cable.

A second submarine cable will connect to Hawaiki Cable’s landing point at Mangawhai Heads, north of Auckland. Other cables are possible add-ons including a Chatham Island link and another to Antartica.

Hydro power nearby

Galasso and Dick aim to build a new site in North Makarewa. The plan includes taking 100MW of power from Meridian Energy’s Manapouri hydro dam.

The business set up for the project, Datagrid New Zealand, aims to win business from large scale cloud users like Amazon, Google and Microsoft who will be able to serve customers in New Zealand and Eastern Australia.

Part of the thinking behind the plan is that Iceland has managed to succeed in building cloud services thanks to plentiful, cheap, sustainable power and a cool climate that reduces the demand for air conditioning.

North Makarewa is not as cool as Iceland, but the average annual temperature is a mere 9.8C. This would halve the air conditioning overhead when compared with most data centres. This will reduce the power demand which is the largest operational cost for a data centre.

The project depends on signing one of the large US cloud companies as an anchor tenants.

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