A mystery $450 million 53-megawatt data centre to be built on Sydney’s outskirts has links to Amazon Web Services’ ‘Project Echidna’, suggesting that project is now worth some $750 million.
iTnews first revealed the existence of ‘Project Echidna’ in June last year, tying it to a different $300 million, 35.2MW site in another part of Western Sydney.
It appears Project Echidna’s scope has either grown in size or was always anticipated to be an umbrella project for several data centre builds.
For both sites, planning documents lodged with the NSW government make no mention of Amazon Web Services.
iTnews unsuccessfully attempted over several weeks to trace ownership of the parcel of land upon which the new $450 million centre is to be built.
But documents sighted this week link the $450 million build to Project Echidna, which iTnews has previously definitively established to be an AWS project.
The new build is in the very early stages of the planning approval process.
AWS has a public position not to discuss the locations of its data centres, and iTnews has elected not to publish the suburbs or addresses of the planned sites.
An AWS Australia spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by iTnews.
Hyperscale cloud providers are in the process of investing billions of dollars into data centre infrastructure in Australia.
AWS announced $13.2 billion of investments last year, while Microsoft more recently committed $5 billion.