Undersea cable, giant data centre planned for South Island

• Published date: 06 November 2021

Construction of the Hawaiki Nui cable will begin early next year.

Once completed — the goal is 2025 — the new cable will link Invercargill, Dunedin and Christchurch with Los Angeles, Singapore and Jakarta, with connections also running to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Batam in Indonesia, and Hawaii.

“I can’t share a budget at this stage as we are in the process of selecting our supplier. We expect to finalise negotiations and sign a supplier contract in March 2022,” Hawaiki chief executive Remi Galasso told the Weekend Herald.

“The South Island, and especially Christchurch and Dunedin, does require a direct international link to Australia, Singapore and the US,” Galasso said.

The new cable is also a vital piece of the puzzle for a second company, DataGrid — co-founded by Galasso and Hawaiki co-founder Malcolm Dick, which plans a “hyperscale” data centre in Southland.

According to a summary of the project by partner Meridian, Datagrid is “planning the construction of a 60 megawatt, 25,000 square metre facility near the town of Makarewa.

“It is anticipated to scale to a 100 megawatt, 40,000sq m facility within several years, covering an area of more than five rugby fields and consuming as much power as a town of 80,000 people.”

That means if the Datagrid facility goes ahead, it will be much larger than the series of “hyper-scale” data centres now being built in northwest Auckland by various contenders. DCI Data Centres, for example, is constructing a 10 megawatt facility (big data centres are described in megawatts, or the amount of electricity they require at peak operation). And the $300 million-plus that CDC, half owned by Infratil, is spending on two data centres will result in a 7000sq m facility in Hobsonville and an 11,000sq m server farm in Silverdale.

Amazon and Microsoft have yet to release any technical specifications for their respective data centre builds in northwest Auckland — although Amazon says the total budget for its server farms in the city will run to $7.5 billion over 15 years.

Dick has framed...