Equinix plans to invest approximately $60 million to build a new data center in Melbourne.
The company's new Melbourne data center – called ME1 – will address strong demand from customers for premium data center services in Melbourne, as data consumption and cloud services experience continued growth in the Australian and global IT markets.
Located in Port Melbourne, ME1 will provide a capacity of 1,500 cabinets, with the first phase of 375 cabinets scheduled for completion in Q4 2014. Equinix will construct a specially built 105,000 square foot building shell to house the new ME1 data center and allow for future development.
ME1 will be built to meet the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System, a framework developed by the US Green Building Council for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions. The plan currently includes evaporative coolers to support low power usage effectiveness (PUE).
Melbourne is a hub for software companies with Victoria accounting for almost a quarter of Australia’s economic activity.
The expansion of Equinix’s footprint in Australia is the latest in a series of expansions across Asia-Pacific markets,. ME1 will be the company’s fourth data center to be built in Australia.
The Australian IT market is continuing to experience significant growth. Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts that by 2017 there will be 23 million internet users in Australia – up from 18 million in 2012. In Australia, IP traffic will reach 30 gigabytes per capita in 2017, up from 14 gigabytes per capita in 2012, making it equivalent to 2 billion DVDs per year, 189 million DVDs per month or 258,430 DVDs per hour.