Hickory Data Centres breaks ground on inaugural site as company rapidly expands

Australian-owned and operated company Hickory Data Centres has just broken ground on its Truganina, Melbourne, site which is set to house a 72MW hyperscale facility made up of two 36MW diverse buildings and 18 data halls.

The sod-turning comes as Hickory Data Centres announced the expansion of its portfolio across Australia with sites now acquired to deliver in excess of 100MW to market across two hyperscale data centre locations. Upon full completion of each facility, it will constitute a $1.1bn investment into the Australian market.

The Truganina site was acquired in early 2021, with the data centre intended to meet the specific design, scale and security requirements of major cloud and content providers with availability from Q4 2022.

Hickory Data Centres has also acquired a 24,000sqm site in Canberra, with plans to build a 28MW hyperscale data centre. The data centre will be designed to a security level of SCEC4 or higher, and include 4,000sqm of office and storage space.

Hickory Data Centres launched in early 2021 as a business division of Hickory, an established and diversified property development and construction company in Australia. It has since been quick to market with the acquisition of the two sites with plans to add additional sites to the portfolio.

Joel O’Halloran, Chief Executive Officer of Hickory Data Centres, said: “We are thrilled to be breaking ground on our Truganina site in Melbourne as the strategic expansion of Hickory Data Centres comes to fruition. These locations will bring substantial capacity to the growing Australian market, with Melbourne one of the hottest markets in the world right now for data centre investment.”

According to a 2021 report by Structure Research, Melbourne’s data centre market is expected to reach US $1.1bn by 2026 with a 20.6 per cent compound annual growth rate specific to hyperscale.

Jabez Tan, Head of Research at Structure Research, commented: “At present, Melbourne has relatively limited options for hyperscale data centre capacity compared to Sydney. Melbourne is projected to see a meaningful uptick in hyperscale demand as both Google and AWS have recently announced new cloud regions.”

At the same time, Hickory Data Centres is also expanding to Canberra.

“While Canberra has an established market, it is still quite narrow in terms of supply,” explained O’Halloran. “Changing customer dynamics have also increased opportunity in the state, with buying patterns shifting.”

Hickory Data Centres offers a unique approach to its facilities, with a vertically integrated model as both a construction business and data centre service provider, which allows the company to develop, build and operate purpose-built hyperscale data centres on behalf of major global clients.

Hickory Data Centres offers highly secure, multi-megawatt optionality that redefines the provision of data centres from construction to production. The business achieves this through distinct offerings, leveraging the capability of Hickory and is backed by a highly experienced data centre team. The solutions include traditional hyperscale colocation, diverse buildings or single-tenant options and full turnkey models that cover the site selection, construction, and provision of Shell & Core services, encompassing the built-and-operated-to-suit service offering.

Driving Hickory Data Centres’ rapid deployment capability is the company’s Hickory Building Systems technology, an innovative system that shortens ready-to-service lead time. By building certain components off-site before installing them at the desired location, construction cost, time and volume of materials required is significantly reduced whilst safety and build quality is improved.

“With the growth and expansion of Hickory Data Centres, we are building to suit the world’s biggest tech companies,” said O’Halloran. “We are driving technology to enact change and enable innovation in Australia, and we’re proud to be at the forefront of this data revolution.”