Alex Moffatt, Cushman & Wakefield’s director and data centre advisory team lead in Australia, said more than 80 per cent of operational capacity in the Asia Pacific area is concentrated in five markets: Australia, India, Japan, mainland China and Singapore.

Moffat said across APAC, 9.7 gigawatts is currently operational, with an additional 3.3GW under construction and 8.5GW in planning stages. For Australia 1145MW is currently operation, 265MW under construction and 1443MW planned.

“Sydney continues to be the largest data centre market in Australia, with 63 per cent of the total operational capacity for the country,” he said.

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“Sydney is one of the top five cities for data centres in APAC alongside Beijing, Mumbai, Shanghai and Tokyo, which are categorised as powerhouse markets, with each city forecast to exceed 2GW of capacity in the next seven to 10 years. Cumulatively, these five powerhouse cities account for 54 per cent of the operational capacity in all of APAC.”

In Sydney, operational capacity has increased by 57MW over the past six months.

Despite this additional capacity coming online, the vacancy rate for Sydney has decreased from 17 per cent to 12 per cent over the same time.

“The next wave of data centre development will see builds exceed 100MW per site in both Sydney and Melbourne.,” Moffatt said.

“Finding suitable land parcels in both Sydney and Melbourne for future data centre development continues to be challenging given the lack of suitably zoned land in both markets.”

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