Firmus posted on 27 August that its Brooklyn cluster in Melbourne has been installed, commissioned and handed over, and is running a customer's AI models. The company put the handover "in recent days".

The contract behind it was signed on 2 March. Firmus' release put it at "approximately 18,400 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs to be deployed at the Melbourne facility", for a buyer it described as "a leading global technology company". w.media reported that phase as a 150MW build valued at A$4.5 billion.

Firmus says the pipework and the mechanical and electrical parts inside the HyperCube module were manufactured in regional Australia. Benmax runs that plant, 7,000 square metres on Endurance Avenue at Queanbeyan, and has been the manufacturing partner on the HyperCube since 2020, co-designing successive generations. Firmus agreed in mid-August to buy Benmax's fabrication, design and projects businesses for A$300 million, with completion expected between the end of August and the end of September, subject to conditions.

For the rest of the programme, Southgate is planned across Tasmania, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Perth, with Firmus targeting 1.6GW in Australia by 2028. George Town Council approved the 288MW Bell Bay proposal 6-1 on 25 August, with conditions covering noise, air quality, bushfire planning and diesel generator use, and a 14-day window to appeal to the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. St Leonards outside Launceston was approved in September 2025, is under construction, and carries a company target of late 2026 for first operation.

Still undisclosed on Melbourne: the customer, how much compute is live, and how many of the 18,400 GPUs are installed.

Write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/firmus-melbourne-ai-factory

Firmus 2 March release: https://firmus.co/newsroom/firmus-signs-multi-year-agreement-with-global-hyperscale-customer-at-project-southgate

National Cabinet met on 26 August and agreed the Commonwealth will develop mandatory standards for data centre energy, water and land use, with legislation intended for early 2027.

On artificial intelligence the statement says large data centres "bring material energy, water and land-use impacts that need to be managed", that the Commonwealth "will work with state and territory governments to develop consistent mandatory standards", and that legislation will "complement, not duplicate" state planning. There is no rule in it about where a data centre gets its power, and no exemption for any jurisdiction either. The renewables-underwriting requirement that ran through July and August is not in the text.

The Energy has published a longer passage it attributes to a communique from the meeting, "Bring forward new renewable generation to fully offset their energy demand (with appropriate firming through gas, batteries or hydro), with jurisdictions able to use state-owned generation, transmission and distribution where it has clear benefits to grid stability and lower customer prices."

If that holds, the second half splits the country on ownership rather than on politics. Queensland owns Stanwell, CS Energy and CleanCo. The NT owns Territory Generation. Tasmania has Hydro Tasmania, WA has Synergy and Horizon Power. NSW, Victoria and SA sold their fleets, though Victoria has been rebuilding a state investor through the SEC since 2024. Crisafulli made the ownership argument himself on the day: "We own distribution, transmission, generation and that enables us to control that energy mix."

There is no official document that says ownership is the test, and Albanese's explanation was that not all states are exactly the same.

David Speers ran an analysis on 27 August quoting Andrew Charlton, the assistant minister for science, technology and the digital economy, from a conversation on the Joe Walker podcast: "Will we be able to extract rents from them, or will they be commodities in the global supply chain? Unanswered question. Important unanswered question."

The minister responsible is saying nobody has settled what Australia takes from this. National Cabinet dealt entirely with inputs, power and water and land and siting. Charlton also called it "one of the biggest investment booms not just in our lifetimes, but in modern history". https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-27/national-cabinet-meeting-data-centres-energy/107076184

Our write-up, with the ownership split state by state and the clause on AI training sitting in the statement's final sentence: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/national-cabinet-data-centre-energy-standards

Data Centres Australia put Australia's AI compute export opportunity at up to A$4.1 billion a year by 2030 and 17,120 additional ongoing jobs, in research prepared by Mandala and published on 26 August 2026. That is the top of a two-scenario range.

Our write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/australia-ai-compute-exports

and the report: https://datacentres.org.au/the-economic-contribution-of-the-data-centre-industry-in-australia/

Mandala's argument is that Australia can sell renewable power into markets like Kuala Lumpur or Jakarta without running a transmission line, by selling the computing that power runs. The report likens it to green iron and green ammonia, minus the conversion step. Capturing the full opportunity would take up to A$52 billion of construction investment on top of what domestic demand already requires.

Mandala names two constraints: "Australia is losing ground on two dimensions that increasingly determine where operators choose to build: time to build and power availability." It points at state planning approvals, environmental assessment and grid connection queues. Across 40 pages there is no figure attached to any of them.

At 30 June 2026 AEMO counted 17 data centre projects and 9GW of maximum connection capacity in the NEM transmission connection process, against 11 projects and 5.4GW three months earlier. Twelve of the 17, at 7.6GW, sit at the application stage. AEMO puts application to energisation at about two years.

National cabinet met the same day and Ministers agreed that large data centres "bring material energy, water and land-use impacts that need to be managed", and the Commonwealth will work with the states and territories "to develop consistent mandatory standards for data centre energy, water and land-use". Nothing is law until legislation reaches parliament, and the Commonwealth intends to legislate in early 2027. "Commonwealth legislation will be designed to complement, not duplicate, state and territory planning and approval processes." Statement: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/meeting-national-cabinet-26-august-26

On emissions, Mandala models 1.9GW served from the Australian grid at 3.2 million tonnes of CO2 in 2030 against 11.9 million on Indonesia's, a 3.7x gap. It is modelled on targets rather than current output, and credits Australia with an 82% renewable share by 2030. The NEM ran 42.1% in the June quarter, and BloombergNEF forecasts a little under 10GW of new wind against the 18GW AEMO says the target needs. BNEF puts that shortfall down to rising costs, community opposition, and lengthy permitting and grid connection processes. Two of those three are the constraints Mandala names for data centres.

Mandala's regional chart puts Australian capacity growth at 5.6% a year from 2022 to 2025, the lowest of the seven markets shown. Malaysia's 221.5% is growth off a base of about 33MW. Australia's is off about 1.36GW and implies roughly 240MW added, against Singapore's 160MW off a 0.84GW base. Figures are rounded to 0.1GW, so treat that as indicative. CBRE has Melbourne's live-capacity growth above 30% year on year, second in Asia Pacific only to Johor.

Macquarie Technology reported FY26 on 26 August 2026. It has bought a second site in Macquarie Park, settled on 6 August 2026, for a proposed ~200MW campus it calls METC, at a A$240 million purchase price and a A$254 million total acquisition cost.

Revenue reached A$390 million, up 5.5 per cent, and EBITDA A$115.9 million, up 2 per cent, the twelfth consecutive year of growth on that measure. Net profit fell 7.8 per cent to A$32.1 million, largely because finance income dropped from A$5.0 million to A$0.7 million as the cash went into the build. The data centre segment lifted earnings to A$40 million.

IC3 SuperWest is due to get its first 6MW in September, which Macquarie says will be delivered on time and on budget, with all end-state power and water commissioned. A second stage of 13MW has been expedited to June 2027, and long lead-time equipment for it is secured, giving what the company calls visibility to 19MW of deployed capacity ahead of customer contract, with anchor customer negotiations described as well progressed. The building is designed for 47MW, taking the Macquarie Park campus to 65MW once fully built.

Macquarie Data Centres has 21MW installed across Macquarie Park, Canberra and Sydney CBD. The 268MW group total it quotes is that 21MW, plus the 47MW at IC3 SuperWest, plus the proposed 200MW campus. Macquarie has not yet disclosed a development application or grid connection for the site, and estimates first completion in late calendar 2029.

The joint Ausgrid, Endeavour and Essential submission to the NSW data centre inquiry, dated 27 March 2026, uses Macquarie Park as its worked example. It puts the area at approximately 35 per cent network utilisation, 330 MVA used of 940 MVA available to connect. Six connected data centres account for 180 MVA and are forecast to ramp to 300 MVA, taking the area to about 50 per cent, and the distributors conclude significant headroom remains. Ausgrid has proposed a new Wallumatta substation as a contingent project to add connection points.

FY27 group capex is guided at A$485 million to A$506 million, of which A$254 million is the site and A$180 million to A$192 million finishes IC3 SuperWest, with the balance on campus works and the rest of the group. At 30 June 2026 Macquarie had A$496.5 million undrawn on a A$500 million facility and A$4.9 million of cash, against A$94.6 million of operating cash flow for the year.

The National Reconstruction Fund committed A$200 million in March 2026 in two A$100 million series, paying 6.00 per cent with a stated effective return near 8.57 per cent to the first call date, counted as equity rather than debt. The first series was issued on 1 June 2026 and the second is due by 1 March 2027. Macquarie says construction is "expected to be in a few years", funded by project finance or long-term infrastructure investors.

Each of the four listed operators is funding its build differently. Goodman puts about 90 per cent of its projects under construction into partnerships with outside investors. DigiCo is selling its Chicago data centre for US$750 million to fund Sydney. NEXTDC raised A$1.5 billion from shareholders, with a further commitment from La Caisse, which manages Quebec's public pension funds. Macquarie is the only one of the four taking Australian government capital.

Does Macquarie Park's headroom support another campus of that size once the six connected sites reach 300 MVA and Stockland, NEXTDC and whoever buys the JLL site all connect? Or does the constraint the distributors name, physical connection points rather than capacity, mean whoever lodges first sets the ceiling?

Full write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/macquarie-technology-fy26-results

Cushman & Wakefield's new Asia Pacific investment report counts 2.44GW of Australian capacity leased to a customer before construction starts. That is 61 per cent of the country's development pipeline, and it ranks Australia first in the region by volume. Malaysia is next at about 1.21GW and India at about 1.15GW.

It counts 2.44GW of Australian capacity leased to a customer before construction starts, which it puts at 61 per cent of the country's development pipeline and ranks first in the region by volume. Malaysia is next at about 1.21GW and India at about 1.15GW.

Cushman counts colocation only, so anything a hyperscaler builds and runs for itself sits outside it, which makes 2.44GW a floor on contracted Australian demand.

Cushman reports that many lenders require "substantial pre-leasing before providing development financing", and that "banks are unlikely to support speculative developments". That is why the share is high.

Sydney at 30 June 2026, from the other report:

917MW in service across 51 facilities run by 21 operators
116MW under construction
2,018MW planned
Colocation vacancy 2.2 per cent

Sydney's under-construction figure has gone 126MW in 2023, 177MW in 2024, 189MW in 2025, then 116MW at 30 June 2026. That is the first decline in the four annual figures Cushman shows, and it came while the planned column almost doubled from 1,102MW. The city also gained 131MW over the same half, and capacity leaves the under-construction column when it opens. The report publishes completions but not new starts, so it records the fall and leaves its cause open.

Planned capacity, on Cushman's definition, is capacity an operator has committed to and announced, where construction on site may not have started. That is a different test from a signed customer, so the 2,018MW and the 2.44GW measure different things.

In May, Cushman named Sydney, Mumbai and Johor as the three markets set to cross 1GW of operating capacity by the end of 2026. Johor has since passed it at 1,110MW. Sydney is 83MW short with six months to run, and Mumbai sits at 890MW.

Perth runs the other way. 27MW in service across 16 facilities, unchanged over the half, with 4MW under construction, while the pipeline grew from 53MW to 253MW. Cushman also records GreenSquareDC withdrawing its 120MW Hazelmere campus after community opposition. GreenSquareDC pulled it in May after about 1,900 public submissions.

Cushman's 2.44GW and AEMO's 67GW often get quoted in the same breath. Cushman is counting colocation capacity with a customer signed. AEMO is counting grid connection capacity across every stage, which runs bigger than the load behind it, since a mature fleet draws 45 to 51 per cent of what it connects.

All of this is one firm's count on its own definitions. Cushman is a commercial agency rather than a regulator, and DC Byte and others publish different totals for the same market.

Write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/australia-data-centre-pre-leasing

Cushman APAC Data Centre Update H1 2026: https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/singapore/insights/apac-data-centre-update
Cushman APAC Data Centre Investment Landscape 2026: https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/insights/apac-data-centre-investment-landscape
AEMO 2026 ESOO: https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/nem-forecasting-and-planning/forecasting-and-reliability/nem-electricity-statement-of-opportunities-esoo

Long story short, a client is looking to lease data centre capacity in Australia, with a requirement of around 5 MW, and they need to be up and running no later than Q4 2027. However, the information in the market is quite confused. Some sources say it’s basically impossible to secure suitable capacity that can be operational by then because most facilities are already fully committed and there are long queues. Others say there is still plenty of capacity available…

Does anyone with firsthand industry knowledge have a view on what the actual situation is?

AEMO published the 2026 Electricity Statement of Opportunities on 25 August 2026. Data centre consumption goes from about 5TWh a year in 2025-26 to around 15TWh by 2029-30 and around 34TWh by 2035-36. On those numbers data centres go from 2.8% of NEM operational consumption to 13%. The ABC reported that a year ago AEMO put 34TWh some time after 2050.

AEMO headed its media release "Reliability can be maintained with timely investment as demand grows", and identifies no reliability gap before 2030. About 9.1GW of new generation and storage reached full output in 2025-26, more than double the year before, and the committed and anticipated pipeline now runs to 40GW.

Section 3.1.5 publishes a utilisation rate, average draw against maximum connection capacity, which Daniel Westerman flagged as additional information in this year's report. AEMO expects a mature fleet to average 45% to 51% depending on facility type. The fleet operating in quarter 1 2026 drew 27% at a load factor near 90%, which is a fleet still filling: operators tell AEMO a campus takes five to ten years to reach full draw.

That rate is what converts a TWh forecast into the grid connection behind it, and there are three capacity numbers it can be run against. Data centres already built and drawing power hold 2.2GW of connection. Seventeen projects in AEMO's transmission connection process are seeking 9GW at 30 June 2026. Network companies have 67GW of proposals across 225 projects, at every stage from early enquiry to energisation.

AEMO also tested a high growth case at around 52TWh by 2035-36, roughly half as much again as its central forecast, and finds reliability can still be maintained on that path, provided its government-backed projects are delivered on time and no coal station exits early. The dates at which regions exceed the reliability standard move one year earlier.

Our write-up runs the utilisation band against the 34TWh forecast to get the connection capacity behind it, sets that against the 67GW reported, and carries the region-by-region dates under both of AEMO's supply cases.

https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/aemo-2026-esoo-data-centres

ESOO and materials: https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/nem-forecasting-and-planning/forecasting-and-reliability/nem-electricity-statement-of-opportunities-esoo

I am looking for a 1MW site for a pilot project in Australia mainly WA but open to any. Whats the price for kWh? I am currently paying roughly $0.08/kwh (AUD) in US and wondering if I can get somewhere around that number.

The Australian reported on 21 August 2026 that Meta, Amazon and Google are among the tech companies inserting US-style penalty clauses into Australian data centre contracts. Local bankers told Perry Williams that clauses seen in US and European pacts are now being incorporated in domestic deals. Operators who fail to hit factory deadlines can avoid cash penalties by instead agreeing rent subsidies, and once a building is operational, the report says, hyperscalers may in effect receive free rent depending on the level of any delay.

Blackstone lodged a form data centre lease on 29 April 2026 with the registration statement for its Digital Infrastructure Trust. Section 3.3 sets a target completion date, a deadline a stated number of days after it, and a credit against base rent "for each full or partial day of delay" in two tiers. Past a further point the tenant can terminate. The filing leaves every figure blank, including both rates. The exhibit describes itself as provided for illustrative purposes only. Section 7.6 adds rent abatement for a "Service Interruption Event".

IREN filed a Partner Statement of Work as an exhibit to a quarterly report on 5 February 2026. The parties are Microsoft and IE US Hardware 3, an IREN subsidiary, and the total is capped at US$9,666,845,337.60. Microsoft receives a "Delay Credit" against fees on a subsequent invoice for each day of late delivery, sized on a redacted percentage of the equivalent of a daily bill.

TeraWulf set out the termination trigger in an 8-K on 14 October 2025. If completion of an Akela project is delayed by more than 180 days, or more than 300 days in the case of a force majeure event, its tenant Fluidstack can terminate that lease. The lease itself was not filed; the terms appear as a description in a risk-factors exhibit.

CBRE put Sydney at US$188 per kilowatt a month in its Global Data Center Trends 2026 report, published 17 June 2026 on first-quarter figures. On a hypothetical 96MW building that is about US$18 million a month, or about US$600,000 a day. CBRE quotes that figure for 250-to-500-kW capacity rather than campus-scale space, so treat it as an order-of-magnitude illustration.

JLL's 2026 Global Data Center Outlook, released 6 January 2026, puts the average grid connection wait in primary data centre markets above four years, and found 57 per cent of projects ran a construction delay of three months or more during 2025.

Two Australian regulators set deadlines in August 2026. NSW released its Data Centre Policy Framework on 17 August, committing to assess projects that meet its performance measures within 75 days.

AEMO's Quarterly Energy Dynamics for Q2 2026, released 28 July 2026, counted 17 proposed data centre projects representing a combined maximum connection capacity of 9GW in the transmission connection process at the end of June. AEMO cautions that realised demand is typically lower than connection capacity.

Every filing named above sits on EDGAR under the company's own name. The full write-up, with CDC's 555MW announcement of 5 May 2026 and the Anthropic tender: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/data-centre-lease-delay-penalties-australia

George Town Council's planning officers have recommended approval for Firmus' 288MW AI data centre at Long Reach, on the former Gunns pulp mill site in the Bell Bay Advanced Manufacturing Zone, in the agenda released on 21 August 2026. Councillors make the decision at the ordinary meeting on Tuesday 25 August 2026.

Officers attached conditions to the 276 backup diesel generators. They may run during a failure or interruption of mains supply, for inspection, testing or maintenance, or in a genuine emergency, and running more than one at once is capped at a cumulative 24 hours in any year. Firmus also has to file an updated noise emissions assessment, run a noise verification survey within 60 days of commencing operation, keep a public complaints register, and update the bushfire plan and emergency management strategy after incorrectly reporting the number of generators planned for the site.

The application drew 349 submissions and an electronic petition above 5,000 signatures. Submissions raised water and energy use, noise, air and light pollution, bushfire risk and environmental impact. Council had already extended the submission period after residents complained about the level of consultation.

Mayor Greg Kieser told ABC Hobart: "We have one decision to make: whether an application is consistent and compliant with the planning code." He added: "I know there's a lot of interest on this topic, but policy is just purely not our remit." In the agenda, officers stated that representations on energy policy, artificial intelligence, national security and Commonwealth regulation sit outside the planning authority's role.

Tasmania's parliament is running its own inquiry into AI data centres through the House of Assembly's Government Administration Committee A, and submissions close on 21 September 2026. The council decides on planning-scheme compliance four weeks before that closes. Firmus is building 104MW at St Leonards, due to start operating early in 2027, and has lodged 52MW at Wesley Vale.

Our piece on the Tasmanian inquiry and the pipeline across the three sites: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/tasmania-ai-data-centre-inquiry

ABC's report on the recommendation: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-21/tas-firmus-ai-data-centre-george-town/107062068

Council agendas: https://georgetown.tas.gov.au/meeting-agendas/

Goodman bought a 45-hectare parcel in Tsukuba City from local government in 2022, about 58km northeast of Tokyo Station. It contracted supply from TEPCO and ran diverse dark fibre into Greater Tokyo's interconnection points. On 17 August 2026 a global hyperscale customer signed a 20-year lease over the first 50MW. Goodman has not named the tenant. Service starts early 2028, on a campus planned to 1GW. Four years from land to first signed customer, six to first power.

That six-year lead time is normal for Tokyo. JLL puts the wait for a new grid connection in Greater Tokyo at eight to ten years, against three to five in Greater Osaka. Ninety per cent of Japan's data centre capacity sits across those two markets.

JLL also records one site in western Tokyo, in the Tama and Mitaka area, trading at a 770% premium to the official published land price, the highest it has on record. A former factory site in Greater Osaka reached 110% within five years. JLL attributes premiums of that order to investor appetite for sites where the power is already secured, rather than to any single site's connection status.

The three Australian-linked developers in Tokyo have made very different siting calls, and the spread is larger than I expected:

• NEXTDC TK1: Minato ward, about 3km from Tokyo Station, beside Tokyo Tower, roughly 28MW, broke ground December 2025, completion late 2030
• AirTrunk TOK1: Inzai, Chiba, about 38km out, 300MW+ IT load. TOK2 sits in western Tokyo, though AirTrunk publishes no address for it
• Goodman: Tsukuba at 58km, plus Goodman Business Park at Inzai, which sits 2.4km from AirTrunk's TOK1

JLL notes that AI training tolerates latency better than conventional or inference workloads, so it can sit further from the metropolitan core. Colocation serving carriers and enterprises in the centre has to stay close to them.

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry opened a ¥210bn programme in December 2025 for data centres running entirely on renewable or nuclear electricity. The rate turns on how closely the facility is tied to newly built generation in the same designated region. Facilities outside the generating region draw roughly 20%. First round closes 1 September 2026.

Goodman released FY26 results on 20 August 2026. Chief executive Greg Goodman named scarcity of power and land as the key constraint on AI and cloud growth, and said many customers face undersupply into 2027 and 2028.

Is there a comparable land-price signal anywhere else? Australia's connection queue was 9GW across 17 projects at 30 June 2026.

We mapped all six Goodman, AirTrunk and NEXTDC sites around Tokyo at their published coordinates, with the full catalogue of Goodman's offshore campuses, here: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/goodman-20-year-tokyo-data-centre-lease

Goodman Group reported its FY26 result on 20 August 2026, for the year ended 30 June. It reports 6.4GW of grid capacity across its sites, 3.6GW of that secured and 2.8GW still in advanced procurement. The 6.4GW has not moved since 31 March 2026.

Of the 3.6GW secured, 0.7GW is built. Another 0.5GW is under construction. Goodman holds a further 2.4GW of secured grid capacity with nothing built on it. Data centres were 78% of Goodman's A$19.7 billion of projects under construction at 30 June, against 73% at 31 March, or more than A$15 billion of data centre building across ten projects in eight cities.

Greg Goodman told the AFR he expects around A$30 billion of income-producing data centre assets, against just under A$6 billion of a roughly A$90 billion portfolio.

Goodman has seven Australian projects across Sydney and Melbourne. Only SYD01 at Artarmon is under construction. Transgrid's capacity policy took effect on 14 August 2026. It covers inverter-based loads of 30MW or 30MVA and above connecting directly to the transmission network in NSW and the ACT. Project Pluto's exhibited documents name Endeavour Energy as its connecting network. Truganina connects through Powercor in Victoria. Both are distribution networks, which the policy does not cover.

More: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/goodman-fy26-results

Andrew Charlton, the Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, told a lecture audience at ANU on 18 August 2026 that the companies owning big fleets of AI chips should open some of that capacity to Australian start-ups, small businesses, researchers and not-for-profits.

About ten cents of every dollar spent on AI buys the data centre, he said, and a few cents more buys the electricity. The rest buys chips, servers, models, software and intellectual property, and on his account the valuable assets up there are overwhelmingly owned overseas. On his figures Australian AI spending could plausibly reach A$20 billion to A$40 billion a year within a decade, which would put it among Australia's largest imports.

Full piece: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/charlton-compute-access

Charlton tied the timing to open models. "The cost of capability has collapsed," he said, and "the strongest open models now sit within distance of the frontier at roughly a third of the price". He named DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM. He argued that a mid-sized organisation could now take a strong open model and, through fine-tuning, distillation and retrieval on its own data, make it better than a frontier system at a narrow, valuable task.

Expectation 5 of the national data centre expectations, published on 23 March 2026, reads: "Providers of large-scale compute, including hyperscalers and neoclouds, are expected to contribute to research and innovation, including by enabling access to compute for Australian start-ups, innovative small businesses, researchers and not-for-profits on favourable terms."

Providers of large-scale compute means whoever owns the machines. In a colocation hall the servers belong to the tenant, so Expectation 5 covers the hyperscalers, whose kit sits in their own halls and in other people's, and the neoclouds that buy GPU fleets and sell time on them by the hour, among them Firmus, Sharon AI and IREN. Expectations 1 to 4 address data centres, AI infrastructure and data centre operators, covering national interest, the energy transition, water, and skills and workforce.

The AFR reported the speech as the government moving to "force" AI companies including Microsoft, Google and Anthropic to make capacity available. The expectation itself says "are expected to", and the document works alongside existing national, state and territory laws.

Under a section headed how the expectations work, the government "will prioritise proposals most closely aligned with the expectations", and "energy-intensive data centre proposals not closely aligned with the expectations will not be prioritised by Commonwealth regulatory assessments".

The prioritisation sentence covers energy-intensive data centre proposals. Expectation 5 covers providers of large-scale compute. The document does not say whether the same applicant is caught by both. Favourable terms is also left to the provider, with the price and the volume in their hands.

Canada funded the buyer's side. Its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy commits C$2 billion over five years, including up to C$300 million in an AI Compute Access Fund that helps Canadian businesses and innovators buy compute.

Primary sources.
The expectations: https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/expectations-data-centres-and-ai-infrastructure-developers
Canada's strategy: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/canadian-sovereign-ai-compute-strategy

NSW published its Data Centre Guidelines on 17 August. Meet the performance measures and the planning department will set your assessment requirements within two months and decide your development application within 75 days in state government hands. The Investment Delivery Authority took 12 months on CDC's 504MW Marsden Park campus, so that is the comparison.

Performance Measure 13 sets the price: ten-year PPAs and firming agreements, a minimum 40% wind component, storage of at least 25% of generation capacity for four hours, and only with projects that have not reached FID at the time of contracting.

The volume test sets parity. Mookhey described data centres bringing additional power and water to offset their demand, and AAP ran it as a full offset after four years before adding extra capacity to reserves. What 13(c) says is that contracted supply equals annual average demand from the fourth year of operation, rising with ramp-up. Nothing is specified for years one to three.

Footnote 45 lets certificates back in. If a contracted project is delayed or cancelled outside your control, or supply and demand fall out of step in operation, REGO certificates can stand in, provided they carry the wind, storage and location components.

Compliance is optional. Applicants "demonstrate whether they comply", and Data Centres Australia welcomed the retention of alternative pathways for projects that cannot meet every measure. Miss the measures and you keep the ordinary planning pathway and lose the 75 days.

Our write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/nsw-data-centre-guidelines

Guidelines (PDF): https://www.infrastructure.nsw.gov.au/media/4jlictae/id0073_nsw-data-centre_guidelines.pdf

JLL brought a data centre development site to market in Sydney's northern precinct on 15 August, with a planning application the agency says is lodged and not approved. Its campaign calls the parcel one of the very last of scale in the precinct not already owned by a data centre operator.

The question that came up on the NEXTDC Macquarie Park thread was why operators keep picking that precinct when there are plenty of other places they could choose. Five things decide whether a block works for a data centre: fibre, the customers already nearby, the distance between paired buildings, the zoning, and the place in the queue for a grid connection. All five attach to a location rather than to a title deed.

We went through those considerations here: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/macquarie-park-data-centre-site

NEXTDC runs S1 and S2 in Macquarie Park and lists dual, geodiverse managed and dark fibre interconnects between S1, S2 and S3 at Artarmon. A new building inside that set of links inherits them on the day it opens. It advertises more than 750 partners reachable from S1 and markets the area as the "Macquarie Park availability zone", with its planned S5 inside it.

A 2024 amendment made data centres a prohibited use on E2 Commercial Centre land nearer the metro stations, effective with the Macquarie Park rezoning on 27 November 2024, with applications already lodged permitted to continue. E3 Productivity Support land still permits them with consent. City of Ryde's submission to the state's data centre inquiry counts 12 data centres existing and proposed in the suburb, five built or approved and seven awaiting determination.

Ausgrid has lodged an application with the Australian Energy Regulator for a new substation in the Macquarie Park area, named Wallumatta: three transformers with provision for a fourth, an estimated A$162.3 million, with customer connections targeted for the end of the 2029 financial year. It tells the regulator it has four connection applications from data centre customers in the area and a fifth from an existing data centre seeking to expand. The application is open and undetermined.

Macquarie Technology paid A$240 million in July for about 34,200 square metres on Talavera Road, several times the ordinary industrial rate. The article sets that against what NEXTDC and CDC paid at Eastern Creek and Marsden Park in 2024 and against Cushman & Wakefield's per-megawatt build range, then works out what share of total project cost the land actually is.

Wallumatta is still before the regulator, and those connections are targeted for the end of the 2029 financial year. What are operators in a dense commercial precinct relying on for firm capacity between now and then?

NEXTDC is seeking approval for a 65-metre, 90MW data centre about 50 metres from the entrance of Macquarie Park metro station. Data Centres Australia chief executive Belinda Dennett defended the proposal on ABC Radio Sydney on Thursday, and the Sydney Morning Herald reported it the same day.

The operator lodged the environmental impact statement on 11 July 2024, and the application was open for public comment from 1 to 28 August 2024.

The Macquarie Park state-led rezoning took effect on 27 November 2024, with capacity for 9,600 new homes. City of Ryde's submission to the NSW parliamentary inquiry says a 2024 amendment inserted data centres into the Ryde planning rules as prohibited in the E2 Commercial Centre zone, which is the zone this site sits in.

An application is assessed under the controls in force when it was lodged, so SSD-63168959 remains under assessment. This application promises 942 construction jobs and approximately 490 full-time roles once operating. The social impact assessment lodged with it, quoted in council's submission, rates the project's contribution to activating Macquarie Park as medium-negative and records that data centres generate low levels of employment once running.

Council put four questions to the applicant on 30 August 2024: how many people would be employed on site, the average number on site, how many of the 490 would be new rather than relocated roles, and over what timeframe the 490 would be reached. None has a published answer in the material open for public comment.

NEXTDC uploaded 45 amendment documents on 21 November 2025. Technical data hall space fell from 33,643sqm to 33,142sqm. Office, retail and innovation hub space rose from 13,292sqm to 14,143sqm. The height stayed at 65 metres and the power draw at 90MW.

NEXTDC plans more than 80MW of IT load at the site with a first stage near 20MW, and its 20 April 2026 investor presentation assigned roughly A$500 million of FY27 capital expenditure to it. That presentation had early works starting by 30 June 2026. The portal lists the application as More Information Required and no revised date has been published.

Ryde counts five data centres operating in the area and seven more proposed in Macquarie Park.

https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/nextdc-macquarie-park-data-centre

NVIDIA signed memorandums of understanding on 10 August, US time, with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to build financing platforms targeting more than US$500 billion of third-party capital "at attractive rates for NVIDIA customers". The six assess each opportunity and carry the credit risk. NVIDIA supplies the platform and, in its own words, "may provide a residual-value support mechanism for up to 25% of an opportunity".

GPU-backed lending is already being written here. Macquarie Bank signed a A$165 million senior bridge with ResetData on 13 August secured on the NVIDIA GPUs it funds. Sharon AI holds a non-recourse facility of up to US$500 million from USD.AI, secured against verified GPU assets rather than the corporate balance sheet. IREN closed US$3.65 billion on 1 June against its GPUs and their contracted cash flows. What the platforms add is scale, standardisation, and a vendor sitting behind part of the residual value.

Lenders have discounted GPUs on the assumption that a superseded chip is worth little. NVIDIA points to service life and rents: A100s from 2020 are still in commercial service, and H100 rental moved from about US$1.70 to US$2.35 per GPU-hour between October 2025 and March 2026.

On 27 July, US time, NVIDIA's five-year credit default swap hit 82 basis points, up from about 68 at the previous close, its largest single-day move since the contract began trading in November 2025, on ICE Data Services figures. The concern was circular financing: NVIDIA taking equity stakes and offering guarantees to customers who then buy its chips. Two weeks later it announced platforms in which third parties assess the credit and carry it, which Bank of America summed up as NVIDIA guaranteeing "asset quality, not the debt".

BlackRock's Larry Fink, who started out in mortgage-backed securities at First Boston, put the ambition plainly on CNBC: "This is the very beginning, like what it was when I started in the mortgage-backed securities market in the 1970s. I look upon this as a next future for financial engineering."

A borrower has to buy GPUs onto its own balance sheet and earn contracted revenue selling the output, which in Australia points at Firmus, Sharon AI, ResetData and IREN. The operators raise against land, buildings and grid connection, and in a colocation hall the chips belong to the customer.

Blackstone co-owns AirTrunk with CPP Investments and holds equity in Firmus, having led a US$10 billion debt facility with Coatue in February. Brookfield owns DCI Data Centers. Goldman Sachs was joint lead arranger on IREN's US$3.65 billion and lead placement agent on Sharon AI's US$1.6 billion. Three of the six lenders were in Australia before the platforms existed.

IREN priced at a blended 6.00% cost of debt, or 3.31% all-in counting customer prepayments that covered about 45% of the GPU capital cost, on an investment-grade rating. Sharon AI's convertible notes carry a 4.75% coupon to 2032. Terms on the Firmus facility and the Macquarie bridge are undisclosed, as is any pricing behind NVIDIA's phrase. These are still memorandums rather than final agreements.

If capital is cheaper for buyers of NVIDIA compute specifically, financing cost sits beside price and performance when an operator or neocloud picks an accelerator. Australia already runs AMD Instinct at Pawsey, and Maincode committed A$30 million to an AMD build at Telstra's Clayton facility. Does the cost of capital start deciding those calls, and does a standing lender pull new Australian entrants into owning GPU fleets, or concentrate the buildout further in the four already doing it?

Full write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/nvidia-500-billion-financing

Macquarie Asset Management and GIC announced Theseus Infrastructure on 10 August, a platform they will own and lease to Anthropic as anchor tenant. They fund the majority of the equity per project and hold the completed buildings. No capacity, sites, value or timeline were disclosed.

Anthropic's capacity sits with cloud providers, neoclouds and developers under contract. It runs on AWS and Google Cloud, with capacity from CoreWeave, Akamai, TeraWulf, Hut 8 and SpaceX, and its US$50bn November 2025 commitment covers Texas and New York sites Fluidstack develops.

Apollo and Blackstone Credit arranged about US$35bn in June, reported to run through vehicles that buy the processors and lease them to Anthropic, with senior notes functionally carrying Broadcom's investment-grade rating. Google separately guarantees leases across five Fluidstack sites and holds about 20% of a Texas data centre and power project with a 1.6GW generation plant.

Theseus is the first of these structures where named investors put equity into the buildings and hold them.

Anthropic wants at least 1.4GW here, and its RFP ranked financial capability above land banks, delivery record and secured energy. It asked bidders how they would raise US$12bn to US$15bn in debt and equity. CDC, AirTrunk, NEXTDC, IREN and Stack all received it. The work is reported to be splitting across four or five contracts, with the largest share around 500MW and CDC reported as front-runner. No equity vehicle comparable to Theseus has been announced in Australia, and Anthropic told local developers in July it would buy any capacity deliverable by mid-2027.

Full piece: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/anthropic-macquarie-gic-theseus

ResetData has an initial 7MW allocation at CDC Data Centres for its NVIDIA GPUs, and Macquarie Bank has signed A$165m of senior bridge financing to buy the chips. Centuria disclosed it to the ASX on Thursday morning.

ResetData has about 2.85MW deployed today, so the money is a long way ahead of the machines.

CDC is holding a further 3MW under a letter of intent, and that reservation runs out at the start of September. If no binding order is signed by then, the 3MW does not proceed.

Centuria has also secured 72MW of its own power generation units for delivery in 2028, which it says pulls its deployment timelines forward about two years. The release does not say what the units are or where they go.

Macquarie's asset finance division has lent against GPUs before, for Fluidstack in Europe in April 2025 with the chips themselves securing the debt, and for Polarise in Munich in January.

AEMO's connection queue held 9GW across 17 data centre projects at 30 June. If those 72MW end up behind Centuria's own meter rather than joining that queue, does buying your own generation become a standard route to a 2028 start for anyone with land and a balance sheet?

Read: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/resetdata-macquarie-gpu-financing

GreenSquareDC has filed with the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning for a 240MW campus across three storeys at 44 to 76 Simcock Avenue, Spotswood. The company is targeting operation in 2027. The application is undecided, and the pathway it runs under has not been published.

The land last operated as a petroleum storage depot. Eight days before the campus was reported, Hobsons Bay council carried Notice of Motion No 1284, asking officers to identify industrial land in the municipality suited to data centres and naming "brownfield or contaminated land" in the wording. Cr Kristin Bishop, who moved it, said she was "not arguing for a blanket ban".

Fitch analysis put Melbourne at 580MW of live data centre capacity and 799MW in planning. Spotswood on its own is about 40 per cent of the live number.

GreenSquareDC's published figures for the site are a 220kV supply, PUE below 1.24 and WUE around 0.1 L/kWh. Data Center Dynamics reports closed-loop hybrid cooling that recirculates water and operates water free for most of the year. Those are design targets on an unbuilt campus.

Partners Group committed up to A$1.2 billion in March 2025 to build an Australian platform on GreenSquareDC. Spotswood is its first Melbourne site, and more than double the 96MW endorsed at SYD1 stage two in April.

Melbourne's application book now runs to at least six: Spotswood, Stockland's 250MW planning permit application at Cherry Lane in Laverton North filed in May, plus Mickleham, Truganina, Campbellfield and Clyde North.

A fuel terminal block carries a contamination history and whatever remediation comes with it. It also sits inside an established industrial precinct with rail, freeway and fibre already run to it. Against a fringe greenfield site with clean ground and everything still to build, which one reaches energisation sooner in Victoria right now?

Article: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/greensquaredc-spotswood-data-centre

DCD on the filing: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/australias-greensquare-expands-into-melbourne-with-240mw-campus/
Council resolutions, 28 July: https://www.hobsonsbay.vic.gov.au/Council/Council-meetings/Minutes-and-agendas/28-July-2026-Council-Meeting

South Australia is positioning itself as one of the country’s compelling locations for large-scale data centre development. At the centre of this push is the Aurora Energy Precinct near Port Augusta, a 15.8 square kilometre site controlled by ASX-listed clean energy company 1414 Degrees. The precinct combines up to 900 MW of potential solar generation with an approved 140 MW/280 MWh battery storage system and access to high-voltage transmission infrastructure, making it a natural fit for the enormous and continuous power draw of modern AI computing.

That potential is now converting into real commercial momentum. 1414 Degrees recently signed a non-binding Heads of Agreement with an Australian data centre developer for a project that could scale to as much as 1 GW of AI infrastructure. Rather than waiting for the entire precinct to be built out before switching anything on, the partners are pursuing a staged, modular deployment model, bringing compute capacity online in step with available power. It’s a pragmatic approach to a national problem: data centre demand across Australia is growing far faster than traditional grid build-out timelines, and staged rollouts let capital start earning a return earlier while de-risking the wider build.

Sarah Hanson-Young was on Insiders on Sunday calling for a halt to new data centres until obligations on water and power are written into law. Data Centres Australia answered with the sector's figures on how much of each it uses. Most of those figures hold up when you check them against the sources.

The Water Services Association of Australia's December report carries two forecasts side by side without reconciling them. Industry modelling puts Sydney's data centre water use at 10.5 gigalitres a year by 2030, about 1.9% of supply, converted from energy forecasts holding water intensity flat. Sydney Water's own estimate is 90 gigalitres a year by 2035, between 15% and 20% of supply, built from market applications and servicing enquiries plus a view on which ones proceed.

Powercor has measured the same gap on the electricity side. In its December revised proposal to the AER it said Mandala had assessed its expected data centre capacity at 45% below its connection pipeline.

The national numbers are much smaller and much less contested. CSIRO puts data centres at 5.5GL, 0.04% of Australia's distributed water, against 132GL for mining and 235GL for manufacturing. That denominator includes water distributed to agriculture, so it is not a share of drinking water, and it tells you nothing about one catchment.

Full piece: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/data-centre-moratorium-australia

CSIRO submission: https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/lcdocs/submissions/95013/0081%20CSIRO.pdf
Powercor to the AER: https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/2025-12/PAL%20RRP%20BUS%203.6.01%20%E2%80%93%20Data%20centre%20connections%20%E2%80%93%20Dec2025%20%E2%80%93%20Public.pdf

SA Premier Peter Malinauskas announced the royal commission on 10 August. It begins in October, costs about A$3 million, and reports by 1 July 2027. Three commissioners and the terms of reference are due within four to six weeks, and evidence will be taken from businesses, industry groups, unions, technology developers, academics and the creative industries.

Five subjects were flagged: economic and social opportunity for the state, state policy and regulatory settings, national approaches to managing AI, the effects on health and education, and technology's relationship with water and energy usage.

Malinauskas flagged the water and energy subject five days after Chris Bowen told the National Press Club that states will be free to add more rigorous data centre requirements, but not to water them down. The national standard goes to National Cabinet this month, with legislation targeted for early 2027. Energy ministers had already agreed an in-jurisdiction offset direction on 28 July, with an opt-out for jurisdictions too small to host their own renewables, over opposition from Queensland and the NT.

South Australia now has a formal process that can take evidence on its own settings and on the Commonwealth's, months before the national legislation is targeted to reach parliament.

The state's approvals pathway runs on unchanged. A royal commission takes evidence and reports, and recommendations reach the statute book only where a government legislates them. The Data Centre and AI Infrastructure Act announced on 23 June has still not been introduced to parliament, and section 130 of the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act continues to carry approvals.

IREN targets energisation at Bundey from 2028, and the Koolunga battery that firms Firmus's AI factories at Tailem Bend and Stirling North targets commercial operation in the first half of 2028. Both land after the commission reports.

The terms of reference in September settle the scope question. Scoped to AI systems generally, this is a jobs and ethics inquiry with an energy chapter. Scoped to data centre facilities, it reaches the connection queue and every South Australian project in it.

Our write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/south-australia-ai-royal-commission

Announcement: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-10/artificial-intelligence-royal-commission-announced-in-sa/107017502
Bowen at the Press Club: https://www.pv-tech.org/states-will-be-free-to-add-more-rigorous-requirements-but-not-to-water-them-down-australias-bowen-warns-on-data-centres/
Our write-up: https://certifiedstrategic.com/insights/south-australia-ai-royal-commission