A Singapore-headquartered developer wants to build one of the largest data centers in the southern hemisphere on a cattle station on the outskirts of the Northern Territory, about 683km south of Darwin.
The plan relies on the region’s abundant resource that the power grid is unavailable to supply: gas.
Energy North submitted the proposal, called Project Ares, to Australia’s Federal Environment Department in June, which is now open for public comment.
The off-grid campus will sit at Murranji Station in the gas-rich Barkly region, near the Beetaloo Basin, and will run on a mix. gas powered powersolar energy and batteries. It comes as Australian regulators tighten up energy regulations around AI infrastructure.
The numbers are huge and indecisive in one important place. According to Data Center Dynamics, Energy North expects to invest approximately $11.9 billion in the first phase alone.
Citing the region’s appetite for the scheme, Bloomberg put the full cost of the project at around $28 billion, a figure not seen in any other outlet and whose currency and construction phase were not disclosed in the report.
The first phase will provide 1 gigawatt of computing capacity built in two phases of 500 MW, and the campus is designed to expand beyond 5 GW over time.
Powering it will be around 1,038MW of gas-fired generation, characterized as hydrogen-ready, along with 3GW of solar power and 16GWh of battery storage.
The data center halls will occupy an area of approximately 90 hectares; the entire site covers approximately 19,150 hectares, with the solar farm alone covering up to 7,000.
Behind the counter, completely off-the-grid construction eliminates the problem of getting close to shore.
Network operators have warned that data center capacity around Western Sydney is close to exhaustion, prompting developers to look for cheap land and increasingly their own power.
Microsoft’s A$25 billion commitment and a number of hyperscale plans have made Australia one of the region’s busier markets, and the area, which has more sun and space than customers, is now getting a share of them.
Project Ares was awarded Commonwealth Major Project Status, which eases federal coordination but stalls approval.
The Northern Territory’s Environment Agency is assessing the application and still needs a decision under the Environment and Biodiversity Conservation Act before it can break ground on the project.
Energy North is owned by Raggiana Global and run by Scott Criddle, former chief executive of engineering contractor Decmil.
The company describes itself as Australia’s independent green power producer and frames the gas component as a bridge to reliability, generation, to give way to renewables as the site matures.
Data centers powered by Nvidia Elsewhere in the country, they are making similar promises of cleanup over time.
Gas itself has a ready source. The Beetaloo Basin below Barkly has long been established as the centerpiece of Canberra’s gas-driven recovery, and a data center consuming its own supply on site turns the captive resource into a customer.
This logic is part of what makes the densely populated and short-on-the-grid remote Territory suddenly attractive to hyperscale developers.
It also exacerbates tensions in the field, as a clean-running campus would eventually start burning close to a gigawatt of gas.
A final investment decision is expected 12-18 months after land approval, with the first phase being built in a similar window thereafter.
Project Ares, along with Energy North’s own Project Sol, an earlier-stage green hydrogen and ammonia venture, is one of about a dozen data center proposals currently being submitted across the area.
Whether what’s left behind can do so much computing, and whether it has the power it’s designed to clean up as it goes, is a question the next 18 months will begin to answer.
