IREN Proposes 900MW Redbank Campus Near Wagga Wagga, Power Not Yet Secured

IREN outlined early plans this week for Redbank, a proposed 900 MW data center campus near Wagga Wagga in regional New South Wales. The Nasdaq-listed operator took the proposal to the local community ahead of a scoping report due to the state's Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure at the end of October, the firWide shot showing the industrial campus exterior and grid substation connectivity at an IREN facility.st step in the New South Wales approval process.

Redbank is not part of IREN's announced 5 GW secured-power portfolio. The company has no grid connection agreement for the site and is working toward one, which places a 900 MW campus behind projects that already hold contracted power.

"Redbank is in the early assessment phase," IREN said in its announcement. "We're speaking about it now to provide local residents with information on the proposal before we lodge a scoping report." The company targets a grid connection in 2029 and expects to build in stages over six to eight years. Community drop-in sessions are set for Nov. 4 and Nov. 5.

IREN is budgeting more than $200 million in payments to Wagga Wagga City Council over 30 years, covering a community benefit fund, local infrastructure and rates, alongside about 500 construction jobs and 200 operational roles. Capital Brief put the development cost at more than $10 billion, a figure it attributes to a source familiar with the project rather than to IREN, which has not confirmed a total.

The campus will connect to the existing high-voltage transmission network and fund its own connection, with IREN planning to contract new generation and storage to cover the load. Cooling is closed loop and recirculating, which the company says consumes no water in operation. A workers' camp will sit on the project site.

"Data centres are the real-world physical infrastructure that powers our daily lives, and projects like Redbank Data Centre ensure we have computing power here in Australia," said Lindsay Ward, executive director at IREN, in local coverage. He said the site was chosen because it avoids prime agricultural land and sits close to the electricity network.

Redbank is IREN's second Australian project. The first, an 800 MW campus at Bundey in South Australia, signed a transmission connection agreement in June with energization targeted from 2028. IREN holds about 5 GW of secured grid-connected power across the United States, Canada, Spain and Australia, and sells AI cloud capacity to customers including Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Wagga Wagga now carries two proposals at this scale. Canberra Data Centres (CDC) has lodged a scoping report for a 1.4 GW campus on about 100 hectares at Gregadoo, priced locally at roughly $15 billion, and residents have started a petition against it, ABC News reported.

Baxtel tracks 127 data center facilities across 42 providers in New South Wales, led by Amazon Web Services with 14 sites and AirTrunk with four. The largest is AirTrunk Sydney at 130 MW.

Two campuses of this size chasing the same stretch of the Wagga Wagga transmission network changes what the region's grid capacity is worth. The first signed connection agreement sets the ceiling for the second, and neither has one.

That sequence is the part worth watching. IREN is committing to land, a low-water cooling design and 30 years of community payments before it has secured a single megawatt of grid capacity, the reverse of how site selection worked when power was the easy part. Where approvals and local consent are the binding constraint, that spending is the cost of a place in the queue.

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