PGIM Buys Melbourne Site for Data Centre Campus, Plans $850M First Phase

PGIM Real Estate has acquired a site in the industrial heartland west of Melbourne for development of a data centre campus, as the fund manager continues to grow its digital infrastructure footprint in Asia Pacific.

The 20.7 hectare (51.2 acre) site at 1 Oroya Drive in Truganina was purchased on behalf of PGIM’s inaugural Global Data Center Fund, the division of US finance giant Prudential told Mingtiandi this week. GDCF, which reached a final closing of $2 billion in committed capital last year, will invest A$1.2 billion ($850 million) in the first of three planned phases of the campus.

PGIM didn’t reveal the seller, sale price or project scale, saying only that Australia and especially Melbourne remain attractive for data centre development due to a shortage of sites suitable for cloud and artificial intelligence workloads.

“At the same time, demand for digital infrastructure has remained strong with many leading hyperscalers announcing plans to develop or take up a significant amount of capacity in and around Melbourne,” said Morgan Laughlin, global head of data centre investments at PGIM Real Estate.

Australia, Japan in Focus

Since its first closing in 2023, GDCF has developed a portfolio of assets across data centre markets in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. PGIM made its first APAC data centre investment in 2021 after forming a $575 million joint venture with US heavyweight Equinix to develop and operate facilities in Sydney.

The latest announcement comes after PGIM acquired a site in supply-constrained Osaka in the first half of 2025, with plans to develop and operate a four-storey data centre with 55 megawatts of IT load, the firm said. The site comprises 17,000 square metres (182,986 square feet) of land within the availability zones of hyperscalers in Japan’s second-largest data market.

GDCF is pursuing a build-fill-sell strategy focused on the low-latency hyperscale segment and targeting opportunistic investment returns. More than $450 million in equity capital has been committed to PGIM’s data centre investments to date, with backers described as “a range of global investors”.

The Melbourne acquisition brings PGIM’s total development pipeline of secured APAC projects to more than 400MW. GDCF will continue to identify opportunities for development across key APAC markets like Australia and Japan, the firm said.

PGIM and Equinix announced the opening of their first xScale data centre in Sydney, SY9x, in 2022. As the first of two data centres to be developed and operated under the JV, SY9x provides more than 14MW of capacity and will be scaled to more than 28MW at full buildout.

The announcement of the Equinix partnership came after PGIM raised a total of $1 billion for its 2021-vintage fourth APAC value-add fund, which included data centres as one of its primary targets, after the fund manager had made earlier ventures in the sector in the US and Europe.

Hunting Down Under

Newark-based PGIM reported the completion of $3 billion in APAC real estate transactions in 2025, including several Down Under buys — among them the $169 million acquisition of 20 Bridge Street in Sydney alongside Proprium’s Anton Real Estate Partners. 

PGIM and Anton pointed to tenant demand for higher-grade commercial assets and laid out plans to upgrade the longtime home of the Australian Securities Exchange, known as Exchange Centre, after the bourse’s relocation in late 2025.

The US firm also scored two industrial deals, teaming with Cadence Property Group to buy a logistics and infrastructure asset in western Sydney from rail freight operator Pacific National for A$145 million and acquiring a half-stake in a Queensland industrial estate from developer Stockland for A$207.5 million under a joint venture with KM Property Funds.

In the retail segment, PGIM partnered with Assembly Funds Management to acquire a western Melbourne mall, Woodgrove Shopping Centre, from Queensland Investment Corporation for A$440 million.