The real estate arm of a large New York-listed asset manager has bought a 20.7-hectare block in Truganina, paying about $8 million per hectare, or roughly $165.6 million in total, as Melbourne leans into its role as a fast-growing data hub. This site will become the group’s first data centre campus in Victoria and fits into its dedicated global data centre fund, which is already worth about $US2 billion (around $2.8 billion) and has a development pipeline of more than 400 megawatts across the Asia-Pacific region.
The plan is to deploy around $1.2 billion into the first stage of the Truganina project, with the initial build expected to deliver about 80 megawatts of capacity, while the firm also works through due diligence on a second separate site closer to Melbourne’s CBD. To speed things up, the company has applied to the Victorian government’s Development Facilitation Program, a pathway that allows major data centre projects above $20 million in metropolitan areas to bypass standard council processes in favour of a faster, centralised approval track.
At the same time, Victoria seems to be positioning itself as a data centre-friendly state even though it currently hosts only about two thirds as many facilities as neighbouring New South Wales. The state government has committed $5.5 million to a Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan and a further $8.1 million to training office-based workers in artificial intelligence, which signals a broader strategy to attract digital infrastructure investment without adding new industry-specific regulations.
All of this is part of a bigger shift where Melbourne increasingly looks like a prime location for large-scale digital infrastructure, particularly for cloud and AI workloads that need reliable power and large, well-connected sites. The city appears to offer more available land and energy options than some competing markets, and other groups are already circling. One Singapore-based asset manager, for instance, is working on a proposed $10 billion data hub in Morwell in the Gippsland renewable energy zone. If power availability, planning approvals and sustainability expectations all align, Victoria seems ready to become a key node in the region’s next wave of data centre growth.
