L-R: Malcolm Roe (DCI), Bill Cashmore (Auckland Deputy Mayor)
DCI Data Centers’ (DCI) plans to build a new facility in New Zealand have picked up pace with the New Zealand Overseas Investment Office granting its consent for the company to purchase land for a major data centre in Auckland.
Approval by the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) is the first step toward DCI establishing its presence in New Zealand’s cloud services market.
The new facility, dubbed DCI AKL01, will be located on a site at Westgate in northwest Auckland and will utilise DCI’s standardised design for a cloud data centre.
After engagement with Auckland Council, DCI has lodged a resource consent application for the facility.
“I am really pleased to see commercial developments ramping up at Westgate,” said Auckland Deputy Mayor Bill Cashmore, welcoming the news. “Regional employment and commercial activities based around the whole of Auckland is a critical regional growth factor.”
DCI, a portfolio company of Canada-headquartered Brookfield Asset Management and its investment partners, already has two large scale data centre assets across the Tasman, in Sydney and Adelaide.
In January, DCI said it would build a second data centre in Sydney, investing $400 million in the 36 MW facility. By May, the company said it would invest an additional $70 million into a Tier-Ready III certified cloud edge data centre at its current Adelaide facility.
DCI Australia and New Zealand CEO Malcolm Roe said he was pleased the company was pushing ahead with its plans to expand in the local market.
“We are delighted to be kicking off our cloud programme in New Zealand; these facilities will accelerate the adoption of cloud services, critical for enabling growth across all sectors of the economy,” Roe said. “This site is the first step for us in New Zealand and we are currently finalising selection of further sites to meet strong demand.
“Increasing cloud use in New Zealand is driving the demand for several high capacity, environmentally-friendly data centres and other related infrastructure within the country. We are pleased to be playing a key role in the development of this vital part of the digital economy,” he added.
In May last year, Microsoft said it would establish its first data centre region in New Zealand, in what it described at the time as "a major milestone toward delivering enterprise-grade cloud services in the country".
