At a glance

  • Cushman & Wakefield’s DC Insights note, published 25 June 2026, finds land now averages about 20% of total data centre project cost, turning power-connected parcels into a distinct asset class.

  • The note names Australia, alongside Malaysia, among APAC markets “increasingly concerned with speculative demand and low project realisation rates,” where grid applications are “used strategically by landowners and developers to inflate land values.”

  • Cushman counts more than 21GW of capacity in the APAC development pipeline and a further 57GW land-banked, much of it with timelines potentially beyond 2030, yet held because the attached power is hard to replace.

  • The one Australian transaction it highlights is PGIM’s Truganina site on Melbourne’s western fringe, which it lists as the highest priced per acre of three named APAC land deals.

  • A global real-estate agency has now corroborated, from the capital side, the phantom-demand problem we documented from the grid side: roughly 44GW of Australian connection requests sit against about 6GW of expected build.

Land has become the asset, and power sets its price

Cushman & Wakefield’s June DC Insights note reframes data centre land as an asset class in its own right. Land now averages about 20% of total project cost, climbing as buyers compete for the small share of parcels that can actually be powered. Optimal sites need high-capacity transmission at 230kV or above, multi-path fibre, secured water and clean zoning. Of those, Cushman is unambiguous that power is the binding constraint, with grid expansion timelines of three to ten years setting the pace at which new capacity can be switched on. That range is about new grid expansion, the slow end of the problem. Where network headroom already exists, AEMO names an approximate two-year connection target, and operators increasingly fund their own firmed supply and behind-the-meter generation, which Cushman itself flags as gaining importance.

That scarcity shows up in price. The Asia-Pacific Data Centre Association, cited in the note, estimates that data centres in Singapore generate about SGD 59.9 million per hectare, roughly 85% above the average across other land uses. Australia sits at the premium end of the same curve. Cushman’s own 2026 APAC ranking placed Sydney second and Melbourne fourth among the region’s primary markets, a quality reading that explains why capital keeps choosing Australian land even as the country’s share of regional capacity has eased.

Cushman now names Australia on speculation

The same scarcity that lifts land prices also rewards holding power without building. Cushman counts more than 21GW of capacity in the APAC development pipeline and another 57GW sitting land-banked, a portion of it carrying approved power that operators keep even when build timelines stretch beyond 2030. Approved power has become worth holding for its own sake. That incentive pulls in applicants chasing the connection itself.

Cushman names the markets where this has become a concern, and Australia is one of them. Some markets, “such as Australia and Malaysia,” it writes, are “increasingly concerned with speculative demand and low project realisation rates,” with grid applications “used strategically by landowners and developers to inflate land values, rather than as part of genuinely executable projects.” That is an offshore agency, writing for a global investor audience, putting Australia on a shortlist for speculative grid behaviour.

It corroborates, from the real-estate and capital side, a problem we set out from the grid side. Network providers passed roughly 44GW of data centre connection requests to AEMO for its 2025 planning inputs against the roughly 6GW the central scenario expects to be built, a gap we examined in our analysis of phantom demand in the connection queue. Two independent readings, one from land and one from load, now describe the same speculative overhang.

PGIM pays a premium for Truganina land

The single Australian deal Cushman highlights is PGIM’s purchase of a data centre site at Truganina, on Melbourne’s western fringe. It ranks the trade the highest priced per acre of three named APAC land acquisitions.

Buyer

Market

Site

Price per acre

Plan

PGIM

Truganina, Melbourne

28 acres

US$2.6m

New 200MW data centre

Range Intelligent Computing

New Territories, Hong Kong

51 acres

US$2.3m

New 200MW data centre

BridgeDC

Banting, Selangor

136 acres

US$1.3m

Data centre expansion

Source: Cushman & Wakefield DC Insights, 25 June 2026. Site and capacity figures for the Truganina deal differ across public reporting; see below.

Cushman’s per-acre ranking makes the point that Melbourne land clears at a regional premium. The deal’s specifics are worth pinning down, because they vary by source. PGIM acquired the 20.7-hectare Oroya Drive site through its Global Data Center Fund, with the Australian Financial Review reporting a price near A$8 million per hectare, or about A$166 million. PGIM has flagged an initial 80MW phase inside a planned three-stage campus budgeted at around A$1.2 billion, as Data Center Dynamics reported. Cushman's figures do not line up with the deal reported elsewhere: it lists 28 acres against the 20.7-hectare (about 51-acre) site on record, and a 200MW data centre against the 80MW initial phase. Treat its per-acre number as indicative of the premium rather than a precise deal record. We have not previously covered the Truganina acquisition, the Global Data Center Fund’s first Australian site.

Contracted power and a customer mark a credible project

Separating a speculative application from an executable project is harder than naming the problem. A real project clears a sequence of gates: secured power, a connection agreement, water, planning consent, capital and a contracted customer, with power the binding constraint. An application lodged to lift a land price clears none of them.

Australia already has a public instrument to draw that line. The transmission connection queue shows which projects have reached the formal connection stage, now 5.4GW across eleven projects split close to 60% New South Wales and 40% Victoria, a fraction of the requests lodged. Contracted power, a connection agreement and a named customer are what separate a real project from a parked land position. Cushman has described the problem; the queue and a project’s contracts are what answer it.

What to watch

Several rule-writing processes will decide where the line between real and speculative is drawn. The Senate inquiry into data centres and AI is taking submissions until 1 September 2026, and how it treats applicant vetting and upfront conditions will decide whether new rules clear the queue or simply narrow it. The Australian Energy Market Commission is due to finalise new connection standards for large data centre loads around mid-2026, and AEMO’s next queue update will show how much of the speculative overhang has dropped away. Each one moves the same lever Cushman has just pointed at: making approved power worth less to those who only want to hold it, and more to those who will build.