Data centres eye AUD $21 billion of NSW & Victoria land

Digital Agriculture Services has released analysis identifying AUD $21 billion of land in New South Wales and Victoria as favourable for regional data centre development. The study focuses on productive farming areas within current and proposed development zones.

The findings suggest a shift in where data centre projects may be pursued in Australia, with developers increasingly looking beyond metropolitan locations to regional and rural districts linked to major energy infrastructure.

At present, 27 of Australia's more than 314 data centres are in regional areas, indicating substantial room for growth if developers follow patterns seen in the United States and pursue sites closer to renewable energy corridors.

The analysis identified more than 2.1 million hectares across about 21,000 farms within current and proposed data centre development zones in New South Wales and Victoria. Much of that land is used for broadacre cropping and pasture-based grazing.

DAS says AUD $2.74 billion in rural land transactions have already been recorded across the same regions in 2025. In New South Wales, the three resource management regions containing Renewable Energy Zone corridors accounted for AUD $2.44 billion of that total.

Land use

DAS named five regions as likely candidates for future data centre activity based on their location and recent transaction volumes: North West New South Wales, Central West New South Wales, Riverina, Hume in Victoria and Melton in Victoria.

North West New South Wales recorded AUD $998.8 million in transactions across more than 708,000 hectares of cropping and grazing land. Central West New South Wales recorded AUD $817.9 million across more than 785,000 hectares, while Riverina recorded AUD $627.1 million across more than 575,000 hectares of predominantly dryland cropping land.

In Victoria, Hume recorded AUD $292.3 million in transactions across more than 15,000 hectares of mainly pasture-based land. Melton recorded AUD $4.4 million across a smaller agricultural area that DAS described as an earlier-stage transition zone.

The analysis also links the targeted regions to Australia's grain output. According to DAS, Riverina, North West New South Wales and Central West each produce more than 4.5 million tonnes of wheat, barley and canola annually on a five-year average basis.

Sarah Gorman, Co-Founder of DAS, said expanding data centre interest in rural areas was creating fresh pressure on agricultural land alongside ownership and climate risks.

"Data centres represent important national infrastructure, and the economic opportunity they bring to regional communities is real. But they also represent a new kind of pressure on productive farming land, and the cumulative impact on our food-producing capacity needs to be visible - tracked in near real time," Gorman said.

She placed the issue in the context of broader strain on food systems and agricultural inputs.

"At a moment when global supply chains are under pressure and the cost of inputs from fuel to fertiliser can shift overnight, the resilience of our domestic food-producing land base matters more than ever," Gorman said.

Energy links

New South Wales Renewable Energy Zones are a key factor behind the trend, according to DAS. It says data centre developers are following energy infrastructure into farming districts because those areas offer access to reliable, relatively lower-cost renewable electricity.

The shift has become part of a wider debate about the land footprint of digital infrastructure as demand for computing capacity rises. While data centres are often associated with urban and industrial estates, regional sites with strong grid connections and energy access are drawing increasing attention.

For agriculture, the concern is not only ownership concentration or climate exposure, but also permanent change in land use. DAS describes this as a third layer of risk for farming districts where productive land may be redirected to infrastructure projects.

"For much of the past decade, conversations about risk to Australian agricultural land centred on ownership - who was buying our farmland and whether that concentration posed a risk to food security.

Then climate risk moved to the centre of that conversation: what acute and chronic pressures - extreme weather events, prolonged drought, shifting growing conditions - mean for what that land can produce, and for the banks, lenders and investors who hold it as collateral. Suddenly the question wasn't just who owns the land, but whether it would keep performing.

What we're seeing now is a third layer. It's not just who owns the land, or what the climate will do to its productivity - it's what the land is being used for. Land use has become as consequential a risk factor as ownership or climate, and it's moving faster than the frameworks designed to manage it.

DAS operates at the intersection of climate risk, artificial intelligence, spatial finance and rural land. We're building the digital infrastructure that makes rural lending, insurance, investment and policy both viable and climate-aware. Tracking what is happening to that land - in near real time - is increasingly central to how government and the financial system understand and price risk in regional Australia," Gorman said.

DAS provides rural land and climate intelligence to more than 100 clients, including government agencies, banks, insurers and agribusiness groups. Its customer list includes the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Rabobank, Ray White Group, IAG, Nutrien and Viterra.

The figures underline how the debate over data centre expansion in Australia is moving beyond energy demand and planning approvals to include competition for some of the country's most productive cropping and grazing land.