Data centre driven by ‘hyperbolic growth’ in demand for energy
Quinbrook says the Supernode project will incorporate a 200MW data centre, making it one of the largest data centres in Australia, if not the largest.
The massive increase in demand for computing capacity powered by green energy has caught the eye of Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, which is building one of Australia’s largest data centres in Queensland.
The green energy developer and investor plans to build a data centre and battery energy storage site at Brendale in Brisbane.
Quinbrook managing partner David Scaysbrook says the Supernode project will incorporate a 200MW data centre, making it one of the largest data centres in Australia, if not the largest.
Data centres have increased massively in size from the time when they were used mainly for cloud computing, where enterprises stored their data offsite rather than on their own servers.
Even just five years ago, a data centre with a 20MW capacity would have been considered to be a fairly good size, Scaysbrook says. Data centres were typically located in cities and would draw their power straight off the grid, using it to drive the microprocessors and to cool the data centres.
But a strong pick up in streaming and video conferencing about five years ago and the more recent adoption of artificial intelligence have massively increased demand for more computing power and larger data centres.
The computing power of the microprocessors increased at a very rapid rate and with it their demand for electricity.
“We have this huge growth in the processing speeds and size, and therefore what we call the power intensity of the micro processes was increasing at a very rapid rate,” Scaysbrook says.
“You could essentially store more data and process more data in the same physical square metreage, but your power intensity of your racks was increasing and going up at a similar rate.”
The “lightbulb moment” for Scaysbrook and his colleagues came in 2019 when Quinbrook was developing what was then the largest ever US solar project in Nevada and one of the biggest customers for the project’s power was a 200MW data centre being developed by Google in the Nevada desert.
“What we were witnessing was a shift in the industry, not only the growth of cloud computing, but all of the hyperscale operators had committed to net zero,” he says.
Where previously data centre developers would seek a site with access to fibre, water and power in that order, the model was being flipped on its head. Data centres were growing so large that access to power was the number one selection criteria, and because many of their owners had made net zero commitments, they wanted green power.
“You’ve got to start finding new sites to host these big campuses wherever you can access cheap renewables at a much bigger scale, like high voltage, mega scale power delivery,” says Scaysbrook, who has been investing in energy infrastructure for 30 years and co-founded Quinbrook in 2015.
“So we started thinking about developing sites for hyperscale data centres that could access power, water, fibre, but the cheap access to the renewables was the primary siting criteria. That sort of was the genesis of our strategy.”
Scaysbrook expects demands for computing power – and hence for power – will only increase as more and more AI applications are developed and it’s needed in the future for things like autonomous driving.
“The power requirement underpinning that is nothing short of extraordinary,” he says.
“In my 30 years of being in the energy and the power industry, there’s not a single industry that has gone through such hyperbolic growth in its energy demands in such a short period of time.”
The $2.5bn Supernode project is to be built adjacent to the South Pine electricity switchyard which is connected to Queensland’s major transmission lines and so it will have easy access to renewable power from projects all around the state. These high-capacity power connections together with Queensland’s low-cost renewable power resources, will offer data centre customers at Supernode significant renewable power cost savings relative to interstate campus locations, Quinbrook says.
Quinbrook also plans to procure, self-develop and construct the renewables supply capacity needed by Supernode customers as their energy demands grow.
The company has already developed and invested in several wind and solar projects in Australia, the US and UK.
The Supernode site has capacity for up to four hyperscale data centres. Quinbrook doesn’t plan to operate them. Instead, it will build the data centres to client specifications and provide them with long-term leases.
The leases provide the sort of long-term stable, infrastructure-style cash flows that the pension funds and sovereign wealth funds who invest with Quinbrook are seeking.
“We’re providing a build-to-suit for a hyperscaler who’s going to take the whole thing,” Scaysbrook says.
“As an infrastructure services provider, we have become a bit of a new model in the space where we’re providing a service to those that don’t want to cohabitate in a co-located data centre.”