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Six in every seven megawatts
will never be built.
Australia has 44 gigawatts of data centre connection requests sitting with its grid operators. About 2.8 gigawatts of that will ever actually draw power. Everything else on this page follows from that gap, and almost nobody reports it.
Below: every facility we can verify, what it draws, who runs it, whether it is certified for Australian government data, and where the published numbers cannot be compared with each other.
Requested, likely, real.
Oxford Economics Australia, commissioned by AWS, published through the Data Centres Association of Australia, 21 November 2025. Source. Developers lodge requests at several sites for one project and let the unwanted ones lapse. The requests are real. Most of the megawatts are not.
AEMO moved the goalposts fourteen years in one release.
In the 2025 planning assumptions, data centres reached 34 TWh, roughly 12% of the grid, in 2050. In the 2026 Electricity Statement of Opportunities published on 25 August 2026, the same 34 TWh lands in 2035-36. The current share was restated from about 2% to about 3% at the same time.
AEMO 2026 ESOO, 25 August 2026. Built from 225 known projects, with heavy attrition applied: only about 36% of developing projects were assumed to complete, and grid connection utilisation averaged about 27% in FY26. AEMO also notes more than 40% of data centre projects since 2025 have dropped out or gone backwards in connection status. The raw 67 GW development pipeline is meaningless without those two qualifiers, which is why we do not print it as a headline.
100 facilities, 29 operators, and no national total.
We will not add these up, and neither should anyone else. Thirty-eight facilities publish IT load, four publish a grid connection figure, twenty-four publish a number without saying what it measures, and thirty-four publish nothing at all. A campus total and its own building totals appear in the same dataset. Summing them produces a number that is simply wrong, which is how most published Australian pipeline figures are built.
The list.
Read off each operator's own locations page on the date shown, or the specific announcement where noted. Where an operator publishes no capacity, the field is blank. Blank is not zero and it is not an estimate.
| Facility | Operator | Where | Stage | Capacity | Network | Residency | Services | Source |
|---|
Confidence is HIGH where the figure is on the operator's own page, MEDIUM where it comes from a company announcement or a network document, LOW where the only source is a media report. Hover or tap a facility name to see the trap, where there is one.
What the build costs, where anyone says.
Seventeen projects publish a capital figure. Nobody publishes rack pricing, power charges or cross-connect fees, because colocation is quoted per deal and the operators treat pricing as commercial in confidence. We do not have those numbers and we are not going to guess at them.
Announced capital cost, in Australian dollars, as stated by the developer or in the project approval. These are build costs, not operating costs, and not what a customer pays.
How Australia actually compares.
Australia is a serious but mid-sized market. One American metro area is about three times the size of the entire country.
| Measure | Figure | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global data centre electricity | 485 TWh | 2025 | IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI, 16 Apr 2026 |
| Global share of all electricity | ~1.5% | 2025 | IEA, same report |
| Global projection | 950 TWh | 2030 | IEA base case, about 3% of world electricity |
| Australia, actual | ~5 TWh, ~3% | FY2026 | AEMO 2026 ESOO, 25 Aug 2026 |
| Australia, projection | ~34 TWh, ~13% | FY2035-36 | AEMO 2026 ESOO, Step Change |
| Ireland | 23% | 2025 | CSO Ireland, 7 Jul 2026, of metered consumption |
| United States | 4.4% | 2023 | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for US DOE |
| Global installed capacity | 103 GW | 2025 | JLL, 2026 Global Data Center Outlook |
| Global projection | 200 GW | 2030 | JLL, same report |
| Northern Virginia, one metro | 4,182 MW | Q1 2026 | CBRE, Global Data Center Trends 2026 |
| Australia, live capacity | 1.3 to 1.4 GW | 2025 | CBRE Australia, Why Australia for Data Centres |
| Australia, world ranking | 5th | 2024 | CBRE Australia, by built-out capacity |
Ireland's 23% is measured against metered consumption rather than total national generation, so headlines saying "23% of Ireland's electricity" slightly overstate it. The US figure is measured 2023 data and is now nearly three years old. LBNL's own 2028 projection is a range of 6.7% to 12%, which is too wide to reduce to a single number. Singapore is often quoted at around 7%. The last figure we could verify from a Singaporean government source is 7% in 2020, and a moratorium ran from 2019 to 2022, so we do not publish a current share.
Four rules, held.
Every row carries the URL it came from and the date it was read. When an operator changes a page, the old figure and the new one both stay, with their dates. See the methodology. Found something wrong? Tell us, and please do not be polite about it.
Two practical uses.
If you need Australian data residency, the filter above shows which facilities are certified for government data and which operators say so on their own site. That is a shorter list than the marketing suggests, and "hosted in Australia" in a vendor's brochure is not the same as a certified facility.
If you are budgeting for AI, the electricity story is what sits underneath every price you pay. Model prices are on the comparison page, and the calculator turns your own volumes into a monthly figure.