The past fortnight has confirmed Australia’s data centre sector is now a genuinely global story, headlined by the largest single commitment the country has seen. On September 16, Queensland Premier David Crisafulli confirmed in state parliament that Anthropic had signed its first Australian data centre lease: a 1.44-gigawatt campus on farmland outside Dalby, reportedly worth AUD 32 billion. The scale is striking against Australia’s existing base — the country’s entire current data centre capacity sits at roughly 1.6 gigawatts nationwide, meaning this single project could nearly double it. Anthropic is reportedly targeting first use in 2027, even though the development application was only lodged with Western Downs Regional Council in August.
Sydney also picked up major news, with Amazon receiving approval for a AUD 2.17 billion data centre. Combined with continued NSW activity following the state’s August release of its Data Centre Policy Framework, the announcement underscores that NSW remains the country’s largest established market even as Victoria and Queensland attract headline-grabbing new entrants.
Nvidia made one of the fortnight’s most significant infrastructure plays, announcing a consortium of Australian operators — Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, Megaport, ResetData, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk — that will adopt its “AI factory” platform to add 2 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity within the next year. Firmus is separately reported to be courting investors ahead of a planned ASX listing, while NEXTDC moved to raise $795 million specifically for AI infrastructure expansion, on top of its already-disclosed 1,200MW M5 project.
The scale of investment prompted a fresh assessment from Information Age/ACS, which reported Australia has now become the world’s third-largest data centre market. JLL executive director Matthew Lee said intense investor competition is a positive for capital flows but warned there is “no precedent for the scale of the data centre pipeline” now working through planning and construction queues.
A separate JLL analysis warned the sector’s AUD 112 billion investment wave could nearly double industrial land rents in key corridors, with Sydney’s Outer Central West facing rises of up to 88% and Melbourne’s west up to 132% — a knock-on cost for other industrial tenants competing for the same land. JLL noted a single 1-megawatt data centre now draws as much power as roughly 40 shopping centres, illustrating the scale of grid demand driving these land and power dynamics.
Not all the news was growth-positive. Community opposition to large data centre developments is intensifying, with critics calling for the kind of moratorium adopted in jurisdictions like New York. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has explicitly ruled out a pause, keeping approvals moving even as local pushback grows in areas including Melbourne’s inner west and regional sites earmarked for gigawatt-scale campuses.
Connectivity infrastructure also featured, though with a reminder of the sector’s vulnerabilities: the Australia-Singapore subsea cable experienced a break on its Indonesia-to-Singapore segment on September 4, disrupting services before being repaired later in the month — a timely illustration of why cable resilience and route diversity have become such prominent themes at industry events.
Globally, the same dynamics are playing out at pace, with Goodman Group raising $455 million for a Hong Kong data centre venture and continuing to shift its global development pipeline toward data centres, expected to represent about 75% of its work-in-progress portfolio by the end of 2026. Taken together, the fortnight reinforces a single theme: capital, gigawatts and political scrutiny are all scaling up in Australia’s data centre sector at the same time, with no sign any of the three is slowing down.
