The area includes the $A200 million Aurora HP data centre in Eastern Creek, Blacktown, the $250 million Digital Realty data centre in nearby Erskine Park, where US cloud company Rackspace’s Australian subsidiary is based.
Both centres are estimated to create 450 construction jobs, and Digital Realty expects to spend more than $200 million on local labour and projected construction costs. Woolworths already has a data centre in Erskine Park.
Meanwhile, the NSW Government has contracted Metronode to build a Tier III data centre in Silverwater, also in western Sydney by the end of the year.
Myriad computing infrastructure of all state departments and agencies will be replaced by this centre and another in the Illawarra, providing up to 9 MegaWatts of IT load. The exercise will create 250 jobs.
At the Western Sydney Region of Councils AGM Blacktown Mayor Len Robinson said the Aurora centre might be the start of a trend. He said the Blacktown ICT sector generated $139 million in 2011, with almost a third from hardware, software and web-design consultancies.
