Stockland Seeks Approval for 250MW Melbourne Data Centre Campus

Australian builder Stockland has applied to redevelop a logistics estate in Melbourne into a 250-megawatt data centre campus, as the ASX-listed group advances plans to expand into digital infrastructure after recently forming a partnership with EQT-backed EdgeConneX.

The proposal covers a 35 hectare (86 acre) site at 72-76 Cherry Lane in Melbourne’s western suburbs, where Stockland currently owns and operates the Cherry Lane Distribution Centre, according to planning documents filed with the government of Victoria.

The filings describe the project as a staged hyperscale campus comprising up to 250MW of IT load across multiple two-storey buildings, with the site positioned near existing electricity and transport infrastructure in Truganina, one of Melbourne’s key logistics and industrial precincts. The application comes two months after Stockland finalised documentation establishing a 50:50 joint venture with EdgeConneX to develop, own and operate a portfolio of data centres.

“The parties will leverage Stockland’s portfolio of assets in major markets across Australia for the development of hyperscale data centres,” the company said in the March filing.

Logistics Site Repositioning

The Cherry Lane property in Laverton North currently serves as a large-scale logistics estate run by Stockland, with existing facilities spanning more than 100,000 square metres (1 million square feet) of gross lettable area and tenants including supply chain operator Toll Group.

Located near the Princes Freeway and Melbourne’s western freight corridors, the estate sits within one of Australia’s fastest-growing industrial markets, where rising power availability and land constraints have also attracted increasing interest from hyperscale data centre operators.

Melbourne has emerged as a battleground for data centre expansion in Australia alongside Sydney, with operators pursuing increasingly large campuses as international tech firms expand regional cloud and AI deployments.

Blackstone-backed AirTrunk in December acquired a site in Melbourne’s northwest for a planned 354MW campus known as MEL2, lifting its total planned investment in Victoria to more than A$7 billion.

Rival operator NextDC has been advancing its 162MW M4 facility at Fishermans Bend, while Canberra-based CDC Data Centres earlier this year opened the first stage of a Brooklyn campus and is developing a larger site in Laverton North.

EdgeConneX Expands

Founded in 2009 and backed by Swedish private equity group EQT, EdgeConneX has been accelerating its Asia Pacific expansion over the past two years through projects and market entries spanning Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and India.

The company entered Japan in early 2025 and in March of this year broke ground on a 200MW hyperscale campus in Osaka designed to support AI-ready workloads and cloud deployments.

EdgeConneX has also been building out a broader regional footprint through joint ventures and development agreements aimed at securing power-rich sites in key gateway markets, as global operators race to meet demand from hyperscale tenants.

For Stockland, the Melbourne proposal marks one of the clearest indications yet of how the Aussie builder intends to monetise its industrial land bank through digital infrastructure projects, with the company increasingly positioning data centres alongside logistics assets as a long-term growth theme.