Goodman's 135MW Apollo clears Sydney planning without a tenant

Goodman Group has secured planning approval for Project Apollo, a 135MW data center in Macquarie Park expected to cost AU$1.4 billion ($1bn), nearly two years after it first filed for the plot at 4-10 Talavera Road. The New South Wales Department of Planning, Housing, and Infrastructure signed off last week, Data Center Dynamics reports, and the approval arrives without a named tenant.

Two existing buildings on the site will be demolished to make way for eight data halls cooled by evaporative towers and fed from the grid, with diesel generators and lithium-ion battery systems installed for backup, and Goodman expects the finished project to support up to 60 permanent jobs. Spread across 135MW, the budget works out to roughly AU$10 million per megawatt before tenant fit-out, a density that needs a hyperscale check.

The landlord is an outsider to the sector in name only: Goodman built its balance sheet in logistics and industrial real estate, yet Data Center Dynamics counts data center projects in operation or development across six countries, including Hong Kong, Germany, France, Japan, and the US. A 32MW Los Angeles building has structurally topped out for handover next year and a 97MW San Jose project is already announced, while closer to home it plans an AU$1.1 billion data center in Melbourne.

Sydney is the market where all that activity is concentrating; alongside Apollo, DCD's reporting names four more sites: a 126MW development on the former Castrol plot at Guildford West, an 80MW conversion of the old ABC television studios on the North Shore, a 90MW project rising on a former Eaton warehouse in Mascot, and a 90MW campus at Cove West.

Together the five locations come to 521MW of disclosed capacity in one metro market, though they sit at different stages of maturity—Apollo alone carries a recorded planning approval in the DCD account.

No tenant appears in the DCD report—no customer, no offtake agreement, no hyperscaler anchor for the eight halls—so the sequence matters: hyperscaler offtake is the new infrastructure rating, and a data center without it trades as merchant risk regardless of the landlord's covenant. Goodman's own record shows the model working both ways—at the Tsukuba campus in Japan, a hyperscaler signed a 20-year lease for 50MW in the first phase.

Build first, find the tenant later is a plausible trade when the scarce input has been secured. PWD argued in August that power politics now sets the AI data center calendar, and an approved 135MW site in Sydney's grid-constrained north is a slot that cannot be recreated by spending more money—only by waiting in the same queue Goodman has just exited.

The financial measure of that slot will arrive with the lease: if Goodman signs a hyperscaler at a premium to the going rate before the eight halls are ready, the two years in the planning system will have been the best-yielding part of the project. If the tenant drags, the approved site is still a sellable asset, but the return will be priced like a land bank rather than an infrastructure annuity.