Southland to be home to two data centres after $50m plan announced

Monday, 28 March 2022

T4 Group Directors Jason Porter and David Simpson discuss the Tier 4 data centre to be built in Southland - the first of its kind in New Zealand.

Southland will soon be home to two multi-million data centres.

In 2020, Datagrid announced its billion-dollar plan for a site at Makarewa, north of Invercargill.

On Monday, T4 Group announced its plan for a $50 million data centre in Southland.

The group’s plan is to build New Zealand’s first Tier 4 data centre, which will runs off two power supplies, ensuring there is a 100 per cent effective uptime, meaning it should never go down.

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There are several Tier 2 and 3 centres in New Zealand. This will be the country’s only Tier 4 data centre.

Directors have not disclosed the site for the centre yet, and resource consents are yet to be lodged. A timeline for the project has also yet to be revealed.

The Southland-born idea came about after the T4 Group was formed last year. It is made up of majority Southland owners, including director David Simpson.

To achieve a Tier 4 rank, the highest there is, it needs two power supplies, which will come from Southland’s two hydro stations, Lake Manapouri and Lake Monowai.

While high amounts of energy were normally needed to cool data centre racks, the Tier 4 design would maximise natural airflow to significantly reduce reliance on powered cooling systems.

Warm air would also be extracted and used by a large local business, Simpson said.

“We are looking to try and recycle off our outputs, such as heat, where we can. That’s part of why the particular location that we’ve picked is specific, so the partner there has the ability to use the heat.”

The centre would also be New Zealand’s first carbon-neutral data centre.

While data centres did not employ a lot of people, Simpson said it was more around the southern businesses it could support.

“The actual data centre itself might run on half a dozen people, but it's the businesses … for example, we will work with the likes of COIN South … to try and assist start-up businesses by having infrastructure available to them.

“That’s what the data centre does, it provides infrastructure to support industry building around it.”

The total project cost is estimated to be about $50 million and would be built in stages, Simpson said.