Macquarie Telecom has flagged a A$80 million expansion of its existing Macquarie Park Intellicentre to a 43MW Campus, including a new colocation data centre, as part of a push to meet the rapidly growing needs of global hyperscale and cloud specialists as well as key enterprise and government customers.

The move will comprise several stages with phase 1, the build of Macquarie Intellicentre 3 (IC3) East, set to enable the firm to expand its data centre capacity from a total load of 10MW to 26MW.  “Subsequent phases will add a further 17MW through the build-out of Macquarie IC3 West,” it added.

The expansion is driven by a focus on customer service in addition to a strategy which centers on meeting the demand of its hyperscale and cybersecurity customers.

“Our entire business has unique customer service that is simply unequalled in the industry – recent reports from the TIO and others highlight how poorly many of our competitors are faring here,” a Macquarie Telecom spokesperson told Telecom Times.

“As businesses and government organisations enter their next phases of cloud investment and new technologies, they need this high level of local support,” the spokesperson added.

The company expects that the initial capital expenditure on the Intellicentre 3 East Data Centre will be approximately A$75-80 million, the bulk of which will be incurred across calendar year 2019.

“This capex will be partially offset by a fee from Keppel DC REIT to the value of A$26-36m for the development of IC3 (East) core and building shell,” said Macquarie Telecom, adding that it will enter a 20-year lease with Keppel including options to renew.

The data centre development will be funded by structured debt financing due to be finalised in Q1 FY’19.

“The investment in IC3 fulfils our ‘build or buy’ promise at the beginning of the financial year in terms of capacity planning for our cloud services and hosting business, but there is plenty more activity underway,” the spokesperson added. “For instance, in our telecoms business unit we are focused on our recent NBN deal and for government customers we continue to focus on security and cloud. We’ll provide more information on what’s coming next for the company when we announce our FY18 in the coming weeks.”

The  firm expects the first data hall in the new Intellicentre Campus to be completed in late calendar 2019, with an opening day mechanical, electrical and plant of 2.4MW. “Further investment in MEP will be funded by the debt facility,” it said.

“The investment will leverage not only the physical investment already on the site, but Macquarie’s 18-year track record of data centre experience, industry-leading customer service, carrier neutrality and commercial flexibility,” Macquarie Telecom Group CEO David Tudehope said.

Macquarie Group Executive David Hirst said the new data centre will be a Tier III+ facility with an Australian leading PUE of 1.28. “It will be certified by Uptime Institute, built to meet Australian Government physical security standards, ISO 27001:2013, and support the delivery of credit card payment environments,” he said.