A data centre company has revealed it’s building a second new centre in Auckland, which it expects will help boost the economy by a total of $1.4 billion. The company is already constructing its first New Zealand cloud data centre in the northwest of Auckland.
It is now planning to develop a five-hectare site in north Auckland into Aotearoa’s biggest data centre and has hailed the new site as a significant milestone for the company. The CEO for the Australia and New Zealand branch of the firm stated that the company had committed to a major investment programme in the country thanks to the increasing use of cloud computing services here.
The two data centres will be “purpose-built, secure, environmentally-friendly” and designed specifically for the New Zealand market. These two investments will collectively bring over $600 million to the Auckland region, with a combined economic value exceeding $1.4 billion over the life of the projects.
Each data centre will create more than 150 jobs during construction and approximately 250 ongoing skilled information technology and telecommunications jobs once the sites are operational.
The company has said it has taken a “highly consultative approach” to the building of the Auckland data centres. It has engaged with both government and industry stakeholders to design a data centre ready for an accelerated digital agenda, one that enables the use of cloud technology to drive innovation, improve productivity, and enhance security to better protect data and information for all New Zealand organisations.
That has included using a local construction company. The intention is for both data centres to be run with 100 per cent renewable sources, and to set industry-leading benchmarks for water and energy efficiency.
The first data centre is already fully leased and will be ready for service early next year, DCI said. Construction of the new centre is scheduled to commence in mid-2022. In the last couple of years technology giants, Microsoft and Amazon have both unveiled plans for massive data centres in Aotearoa.
Meanwhile, a US-based tech giant revealed it was going to build a $100 million data centre in 2020. And in September 2021 a world-leading e-commerce platform confirmed it will open a new Cloud Region in New Zealand in 2024. The company says it will invest around NZ$7.5 billion into the country over the next 15 years and create 1000 jobs.
The global data centre market was valued at $187.35 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $517.17 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 10.5% from 2021 to 2030.
Physical data centre facilities in an enterprise are designed to share IT operations and equipment to store, process, and disseminate data and applications. Further, data centres are based on a network of computer applications and storage solutions intended to share information and data.
The shift in traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual network-based data centres – a result of the advancement in multi-cloud computing – is driving the growth of data centres globally. The modern data centre in an enterprise can communicate with multiple sites, both cloud computing and on-premises.
The data centre market is expected to witness notable growth during the forecast period, owing to the rise in data centre complexities due to scalability. Furthermore, the rise in penetration of high-end cloud computing in enterprises, globally in developing economies drives the growth of the data centre market during the forecast period. Moreover, an increase in the investment in a data centre application globally is expected to propel market growth.
However, the rise in concerns related to data privacy paired with the growing demand for managed services is expected to restrain the market growth. Further, an increase in penetration of the Internet of Things and hybrid & multi-cloud architecture solutions is expected to provide a lucrative opportunity for the growth of the data centre market during the forecast period.
