GreenSquare Launches First Phase of SYD1 Data Center Campus in Sydney, Retrofitting Former IBM Site for AI Workloads

Australian data center developer GreenSquare has brought the first phase of its SYD1 campus online in Western Sydney, converting a three-decade-old IBM facility into a high-density colocation site built for artificial intelligence computing. The milestone underscores a growing trend in the Australian market: repurposing legacy infrastructure rather than building from scratch to meet accelerating demand for AI-grade capacity.

The facility, located at 3 Brookhollow Avenue within the Norwest Business Park, reuses an IBM data center that originally opened in 1995. GreenSquare said the delivery took eight months, with main construction works beginning in February 2026 in partnership with Erilyan and Fredon. The updated site has been engineered to support high-density AI workloads and features direct-to-chip liquid cooling.

GreenSquare said it retained the building's existing slab while relocating data halls to the ground floor, allowing higher-density compute without additional structural reinforcement. The reconfiguration increased IT capacity within the original building footprint by 275 percent. The company also replaced the original cooling towers with a closed-loop system that operates without evaporative cooling for approximately 96 percent of the year, while rainwater harvesting is expected to offset roughly 10 percent of annual cooling water requirements and reduce reliance on potable water.

Anchor tenant Sharon AI, an Australian AI cloud provider listed on Nasdaq, is deploying approximately 8,200 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs at the facility. GreenSquare chief technology officer Joshua Martens framed the project as an exercise in reinvention: "We saw an opportunity to give a 30-year-old data center a completely new purpose. By rethinking the building's configuration, introducing prefabricated systems design, and using the latest technology to reduce carbon, we've created a facility that can support some of today's most demanding compute requirements while using resources far more efficiently."

GreenSquare, which launched in October 2022 and was acquired by Swiss private equity firm Partners Group in March 2025, now plans to expand the campus with a new 80MW development that would take the site's total capacity to 110MW. The company had initially outlined a project in Perth, Western Australia, but dropped it earlier this year and is now pursuing a large-scale development in Melbourne, Victoria. For Sharon AI, the Sydney deployment adds to existing capacity arrangements with Equinix in Sydney and NextDC in Melbourne, as well as a partnership with CDC. The neocloud says it has 212MW of capacity online or in development and around 64,000 Nvidia GPUs due to be deployed by mid-2027; it went public earlier this year, recently acquired a former paper mill in New South Wales, and has a large project planned in Texas.

The retrofit approach carries broader significance for Australia's data center sector, where land, power and construction timelines increasingly constrain new-build projects. By extracting substantially more compute from an existing envelope and cutting water and cooling-related resource use, GreenSquare is betting that adaptive reuse can deliver AI-ready capacity faster than greenfield development — a model likely to draw scrutiny from operators facing similar density and sustainability pressures across the region.