CDC's $15b, 1.4GW Wagga data centre plan draws resident backlash and council split

Canberra Data Centres (CDC) has put forward a $15 billion data centre at Gregadoo, about 15 kilometres from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, with potential power demand of up to 1.4 gigawatts. Reporting on the plan says it would be among the biggest facilities of its type in Australia if approved. Other large proposals named alongside it are Anthropic's $32 billion project in Queensland and Syncline Energy's 2.4-gigawatt hub in Melbourne.

The campus would span four buildings on 104 hectares next to the Gregadoo Waste Management Centre, with 189,000 square metres of floor space. A scoping report filed with the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure describes single-storey buildings, each about the size of a supermarket distribution centre. CDC plans to pay for its own grid connection and network upgrades, and closeness to Transgrid's Wagga Wagga substation is central to the site choice.

CDC chief executive Greg Boorer has described the project as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" for Wagga and the Riverina. He has cited the location between renewable energy zones, spare grid capacity, transmission infrastructure, available land and a skilled workforce with a local university. The company says construction could employ about 1500 people, with at least 200 permanent jobs at the facility, and that closed-loop cooling would rely on rainwater with an initial fill of up to 250,000 litres. It has also proposed a community benefits package worth up to $225 million.

Wagga Wagga City Council has been in talks with CDC for roughly nine months. On a vote in the past week, it authorised its general manager to negotiate the sale of council-owned land at 232 Ashfords Road to CDC, conditional on agreement over community benefits. The council bought that land in November 2024 using Transgrid Community Project Initiative money, intending it for waste centre expansion. Councillors Mike Henderson and Jenny McKinnon opposed the move and Amelia Parkins abstained, with all three saying they wanted more information and consultation. In a statement, the council called the project a "generational economic opportunity" while accepting residents may worry about its scale and environmental effects.

About 120 people went to a community meeting, where residents said they felt "blindsided" after learning IREN, an AI computing company, also plans a facility in Gregadoo. IREN's Redbank Road proposal is valued at more than $10 billion, with planned capacity of 900 megawatts. Resident Rachael Cornius-Randall said the suburb was being changed "from a serene rural and residential area into an industrialised energy and data precinct with no regards for the people who live here". She added that the data centres would sit too close to homes and Lake Albert Public School. The CDC plan has already drawn petitions and worries about noise, fire risk, water use and strain on the grid.

Former Museum of the Riverina manager Luke Grealy said the community benefit figures were small, telling the meeting "Those amounts are chicken feed compared to the scale of what’s planned," in his words. He described the meeting as calm, with residents looking for answers rather than just opposing development. The project still needs NSW Government assessment and approval, and the environmental impact statement and public exhibition are yet to come.