NextDC starts work on new Darwin data centre

An announcement signalling work on a new $80m Darwin data centre was not without controversy. Find out what happened.

Work has begun on Darwin’s $80m NextDC D1 data centre.

The Territory’s first ever data centre, construction is expected to be completed by the middle of next year.

NextDC head of WA Sales, Claire Sangster said the centre, which will have 1500 racks and support an 8MW IT load, would be a significant step towards digitising the NT.

“The data centre is the catalyst that allows other services to come in,” Ms Sangster said.

“On its own, it’s just a data centre but you’ll find it’s going to attract investment from other telecommunications providers we may not have had here before.

“It will bring international investment that’s all about helping to grow the economy, cloud and those other types of services that have probably never been available in Darwin.

“Australia’s a big country and if you don’t have data centre’s locally they’re very difficult to get access too because of challenges we have around latency.

Chief Minister Natasha Fyles after being made aware the NT Independent had arrived.

“Partnerships like university and higher education more broadly are really important to us because when we build a data centre, we’re bringing in an ecosystem of capability that wraps around.

“Nationally at this time we’re looking at internship programs where we can partner with the universities to bring in that future skill set because it’s not just about the resource shortages we face now, but we’ve also got to look at how we build that pool that’s going to support we’re doing in the future.”

Specialist data centre builder Kapitol Group has been brought in from Melbourne to build the centre.

Kapitol founder and director Andrew Deveson said about 90 per cent of the estimated 200 employees who would work on the project would be local.

NT Independent reporter Christopher Walsh being politely asked to leave.

He said Kapitol had built more than a dozen data centres.

“It’s a relativy new, emerging, market, highly technical and we’re deep in the market,” he said.

“There’s generators, UPS’ that you can only use international people typically but vast majority of sub-contractors we’ve been using have been local,” he said.

“In terms of locals working on the ground it will be about 90 per cent so there’s very few people that we need to fly in but it’s all local supply chains.”

Chief Minister Natasha Fyles left the launch early when a reporter from online publication NT Independent appeared.

The Labor government has weathered criticism since banning NT Independent reporters from all government media events, and the Chief Minister’s demeanour changed when the publication’s reporter, Christopher Walsh, appeared on site.

When efforts by the Chief Minister to have him escorted from the construction site failed, she made a brief speech before posing for photographs and leaving, without conducting a media interview.

Mr Walsh said he had planned to ask Ms Fyles questions she had refused to answer from him face-to-face about whether she had breached the ministerial code of conduct through a share portfolio she held with Woodside.

Ms Fyles had previously said she did not breach the ministerial code.