Summary
- Zerra proposes a four-phase AI-ready campus on roughly 725.5 hectares near Dalby.
- Phase one includes a 540MVA substation and the first 36,000-square-metre data-centre building.
- The developer says the campus will be primarily air cooled, supported by closed-loop liquid cooling using harvested rainwater and treated wastewater.
Zerra has filed plans for a large AI-ready data-centre campus in Queensland’s Western Downs, putting dedicated electrical infrastructure and a primarily air-cooled design at the centre of a project whose full development has been valued at around AU$31bn.
The proposed site covers approximately 725.5 hectares near Dalby, around 250km west of Brisbane. It currently includes the Wambo cattle feedlot and sits within an area containing major electricity-generation and transmission infrastructure.
Zerra’s proposal envisages four development phases. The first includes a 36,000-square-metre data-centre building, battery-backed power conditioning, and a dedicated 540MVA substation. Three further buildings of similar reported floor area would follow under later phases.
The developer says the campus will be primarily air cooled, supported by a closed-loop liquid-cooling system using harvested rainwater and treated wastewater. That choice is particularly relevant for a project of this scale in Queensland, where heat-rejection performance and water demand could otherwise become significant pieces of the operating envelope.
Air cooling does not remove the cooling challenge. High-density AI hardware generates large amounts of heat, and facilities must still move that heat from chips and racks into an external rejection system. The final balance between air and liquid cooling will therefore determine both electrical efficiency and water use.
The Western Downs location shows how AI-scale data-centre development increasingly follows energy infrastructure. The site is close to the Braemar substation and a cluster of generating assets, including gas and renewable generation. That gives the developer access to a power environment shaped by heavy infrastructure rather than dense urban property.
The land requirement is equally striking. More than 700 hectares provides room not only for data halls but for substations, internal transmission, roads, security offsets, construction staging, energy infrastructure, and later phases. That differs sharply from European markets where hyperscale developers are often assembling constrained parcels around existing metropolitan hubs.
DataCentral has been tracking the outward migration of European data-centre projects as electricity and developable land become harder to secure in established locations. Western Downs represents the same power-first logic at a much larger spatial scale: put compute where a large energy system and a very large land parcel can be coordinated together.
The cooling strategy also offers a useful contrast with Europe’s water debate. European operators are being pushed to disclose more information about energy and water performance, while water stress is becoming a planning consideration in parts of Ireland, Spain, France, and southern Europe. A design relying predominantly on air cooling and closed-loop liquid systems could reduce direct operational water demand, although its electricity performance will depend on the final cooling architecture and local conditions.
The proposal remains subject to approval and detailed project development. AU$31bn describes the potential full build-out rather than committed expenditure already under construction, and the filing does not guarantee all four phases will be delivered.
The first meaningful engineering test will be the 540MVA electrical programme. If Zerra advances the site, the relationship between that substation, available generation, transmission capacity, and the eventual IT load will determine how quickly a remote Queensland site can be converted into a large AI infrastructure campus.
