Thursday Roundup: Macquarie Data Centers, Coravel, MCNC, Lightpath

Two data center projects and two regional fiber buildouts:

Macquarie Data Centers has exercised an option to buy some more land for a new campus in Sydney’s North Zone. They are acquiring a 368,000-square-foot light industrial zoned site between the M2 and Talavera Road within Macquarie Park. On that land they plan to build 200MW of IT load over the next few years, with initial construction expected to be complete in late 2029. They hope to convert a part of the property into a 1-acre park with a community garden.

ACS Group and BlackRock’s GIP have officially launched Coravel, which will be the operating brand for the infrastructure platform they announced back in November. And Coravel starts with its first hyperscaler customer in tow, with an agreement covering 140MW of critical IT load. That capacity will be spread across three facilities at Coravel’s Dallas-Fort Worth Campus, and includes rights to another 100MW of future expansion across two others. The campus is expected to be delivered in phases through 2028.

MCNC, the owner and operator of the North Carolina Research and Education Network, has polished off its HERO project down in North Carolina. Backed by $11M from NTIA and $2.7M from the Golden Leaf Foundation, MCNC invested another $5M of its own funds. Actual construction started a little less than 2 years ago, with impacts to 696 anchor institutions and 350K housing units. They didn’t build that last mile directly, but rather the middle mile fiber they built made the case easier for commercial last mile providers to make their own investments.

And Lightpath has some more support for its buildout in eastern Pennsylvania. They have secured a second infrastructure tenant that will leverage 60% of the new infrastructure they are building out in the Susquehanna region. The 10-year agreement increases the planned regional capacity by 30% and adds connectivity to another multi-gigawatt campus. The buildout originally called for 130 route miles of new fiber, but had some 400 route miles in mind over time.

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