Australian data-centre demand is forecast to grow from roughly 4 TWh in FY25 to 12 TWh by FY30 — about 25 % a year — and the market operator's large-load connection queue passed 5 GW in mid-2026. Victoria alone carries more than 9 GW of announced projects. Yet the industry's own estimate is that only around 0.7 GW of that will be energised by 2030.
Three constraints that decide which sites get built
1. Voltage. Loads above roughly 500 MW are unlikely to be supported on 220 kV-only terminal stations; they need 500/220 kV transformation. In practice that means a site within a few kilometres of a 500 kV line with a vacant easement — a rare combination inside a capital city.
2. Contingency. Under the National Electricity Rules a single load in Victoria cannot exceed the 600 MW largest-credible-contingency limit. A gigawatt campus therefore needs three or more connection points and a staged energisation profile agreed with the transmission planner before it can be approved.
3. Terminal-station scarcity. The planner will support only one new declared shared terminal station within a given radius. The first proponent to lock a location becomes the hub that later projects must connect through.
What a credible site looks like
- A formal, rules-based Connection Enquiry Response — not a desktop enquiry — with quantified fault-level and system-strength figures.
- A defined pathway: terminal-station land, connection-point count, staging profile.
- A second and third supply layer — interim distribution supply and on-site generation with grid-forming storage — so construction and first load do not wait on the transmission programme.
- Gas, water, sewer and carrier responses in hand, because a campus that has power but no water permit is still not a campus.
Why we run the power process first
QORINAI's flagship programme in Victoria was taken through the transmission enquiry, the utility responses and the microgrid design before a single hall was drawn. The result is a 1,000 MW connection assessed feasible and a repeatable 250 MW module that sits inside the contingency limit. The Project Ironbark page explains the approach; the technical overview sets out the supply architecture.
Talk to the team that builds it.
Land and power, halls, hardware, GPU operations and the IntraLLM platform — one enquiry.