Plans have been filed for a gigawatt-scale off-grid data center campus in Western Australia.

Gingerah Energy has filed for the Meridien Renewable Energy Hub and Data Centre with the Australian National Environmental Protection Agency’s EPBC portal.

The company is aiming to develop the Frazier Downs pastoral lease, on land located some 100km (62 miles) south of Broome.

Spanning around 27,520 hectares, the project would consist of a 6.7GW renewable energy hub featuring approximately 5.2GW of solar capacity and 1.5GW of wind turbines, supported by 5GW of battery energy storage and around 1.5GW of natural gas firming capacity. This would power a 1GW data center campus and on-site substations.

The first stage, featuring up to 240MW IT load, is anticipated to be progressively constructed and commissioned over two to three years. Construction could reportedly start in 2029, and full build-out is targeted for 2038. The data centers would feature closed-loop cooling to reduce water use.

“Project Meridien has the potential to become Western Australia’s most significant near-term sustainable AI campus, combining gigawatt-scale data center capacity with dedicated renewable energy infrastructure and potentially the lowest latency connectivity to Singapore of any location in Australia,” said Gingerah Energy founder and CEO, Jap van Hattum. “Our proposition is not to finance and build a multibillion-dollar development ourselves, but to establish an investment-ready infrastructure platform bringing together specialist energy providers, data center developers and anchor customers.”

Gingerah Energy is a joint venture whose partners include Longreach Capital Investment, the Karajarri Traditional Lands Association (KTLA) – the registered native title body for the Karajarri people – and Fugro Exploration (the Australian arm of Dutch geodata company Fugro).

The Karajarri people own the land the project is set to be built on. Gingerah Energy entered into an Indigenous Land Use Agreement for the land two years ago. The site was previously earmarked to be a large-scale renewables-based green hydrogen and ammonia project, with Gingerah set to include geothermal power generation capacity.