Ben Kepes: There are dollars in data centres
20 Dec, 2020 06:37 PM
5 minutes to read
By: Ben Kepes
Imagine a small country, isolated in the middle of a vast ocean. Imagine it covered in green grass and with lots of glaciers and fiords. Now add in a relatively small, yet well-educated population, good social cohesion, respected democratic structures and processes and more than its share of innovation.
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Of course, you d assume that I m talking about New Zealand. Except I m not. Rather I m thinking of another, similar country as far away from New Zealand as it is possible to get.
A few years ago I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at a conference in Iceland. In my keynote address, I waxed poetic about the similarities between the two countries. They have Bjork and we have Dave Dobbyn. Essentially the same thing, right?
Artist’s impression of the Datagrid data centre at North Makarewa, near Invercargill. Meridian Energy has agreed to supply Datagrid with 100 megawatts of power from the 800MW Manapouri hydro scheme if the plan goes ahead. Hawaiki Cable founder Remi Galasso and CallPlus co-founder Malcolm Dick aim to have the Datagrid project operating in 2023. They hope to take advantage of the cool climate and cheap renewable power to become a hub for cloud computing. The Makarewa project still requires one of Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft to become an anchor tenant.
Barry Harcourt/Stuff
The Manapōuri Hydro Station would power the data centre and possibly Stewart Island.
Datagrid plans $500m hyperscale DC and two new subsea cables Sign in with LinkedIn
17 December 2020 | Natalie Bannerman Datagrid New Zealand has announced plans to build a new $500 million (A$700 million) hyperscale data centre in South Island, New Zealand.
The new facility, to be located in North Makarewa in Southland, will enable tech giants like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, to serve close to 20 million customers across eastern Australia and New Zealand.
The project has already garnered input from Meridian Energy which will deliver 100MW of power from its 800MW Manapouri hydro scheme to the Datagrid site.
Born the brainchild of Hawaiki Cable founder, Remi Galasso and CallPlus co-founder Malcolm Dick, the aim of Datagrid aims to replicate the success of other of the Icelandic data centre industry, which is known for its cool climate and cheap sustainable power to become of the biggest data and cloud hubs globally.
Fiordland buffer zone project going ahead voxy.co.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from voxy.co.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Your playlist will load after this ad The facility will be built on a chunk of Makarewa farmland. Source: 1 NEWS
A $700 million facility is to be built at Makarewa, near Invercargill.
Huge amounts of digital data is produced by people scrolling social media and streaming from the likes of Netflix and TVNZ OnDemand.
Some of it could end up being stored in Southland in the country s first hyperscale data centre.
“We do believe that Invercargill is the perfect location for data centres,” says Remi Galasso, one of the men behind Datagrid.
“The whole world needs to find sources of green energy to store the data.”