At a glance
Zerra DC posted 17 senior roles to deliver its Western Downs Digital Park near Dalby, where Anthropic has signed a long-term lease, the Australian Financial Review reported on 16 September 2026.
The roles are based in Brisbane with regular travel to the site, covering construction delivery, mechanical design, project controls, quality and commissioning.
Across 5,592 job ads tracked from 5 July to 1 October 2026, Certified Strategic found 387 data centre roles at 86 employers.
New South Wales and Victoria hold nine in ten of the tracked roles that name a state, and neither state pulled ahead over the three months.
On Indeed's 2025-26 figures, IT infrastructure, operations and support roles and management roles lead data centre job postings.
Certified Strategic has tracked Australian data centre job ads since February 2026. This analysis covers ads collected from 5 July 2026, from employer careers sites and, from 29 July, SEEK and LinkedIn. A new hiring signal in that tracking sits in regional Queensland, where Zerra DC has posted 17 senior roles to build the campus the Financial Review reports Anthropic has leased.
Zerra DC is hiring the team to build Western Downs Digital Park
Zerra DC, a Singapore developer owned by investment manager AGP, posted 17 senior roles for its Western Downs Digital Park at Kogan, about 37km north west of Dalby. The roles are based in Brisbane with regular travel to the site, and include a Construction Delivery Lead, a Design Manager (Mechanical), a Capital Project Controls Lead and a Senior Manager, Quality and Commissioning. The Construction Delivery Lead advertisement, posted on 25 September 2026, describes the campus as "a major new hyperscale data centre campus at Kogan in Queensland" and covers delivery from "the first leased building" through to future buildings as they mobilise.
Anthropic has signed a long-term lease at the campus, the Australian Financial Review reported on 16 September 2026. Zerra's application is with Western Downs Regional Council and covers four buildings totalling 1.44GW on 725.5 hectares.
Zerra is assembling a senior delivery team in Brisbane while its application is assessed, led by director-level roles in construction delivery and project controls. The titles name project disciplines rather than data centre work, the kind of title the strict count of data centre roles does not pick up, and that count put Queensland at eight across three months. The state's wider build is set out in Queensland's data centre and AI infrastructure pipeline.
New South Wales and Victoria hold nine in ten tracked data centre roles
Of 5,592 advertisements collected to 1 October 2026, 387 were data centre roles: ads whose title and description identify the job as data centre work, with recruitment agency listings left out. New South Wales held 182 of the 365 that named a state and Victoria 149, and neither state pulled ahead over the three months. Both hold most of the operating fleet, set out in where Australia's data centre build stands, state by state.
In Victoria, STACK Infrastructure is hiring the crew to run its Truganina campus in Melbourne's west, where its second building was completed in November 2025.
The Australian Capital Territory ranks third with 11 roles, and over the three months to August Indeed found data centres mentioned in 1.6 per cent of its job ads, ahead of New South Wales on 1.3 per cent and Victoria on 1.2 per cent.
State | Data centre roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
1. New South Wales | 182 | 49.9% |
2. Victoria | 149 | 40.8% |
3. Australian Capital Territory | 11 | 3.0% |
4. Queensland | 8 | 2.2% |
4. Western Australia | 8 | 2.2% |
6. Tasmania | 4 | 1.1% |
7. South Australia | 2 | 0.5% |
8. Northern Territory | 1 | 0.3% |
Source: employer careers sites from 5 July 2026 and SEEK and LinkedIn from 29 July, to 1 October 2026. 365 of the 387 data centre roles named a state.
Every ad in the count is a single listing, so one role posted in two cities counts twice, and the figures measure advertising rather than hires.
IT operations and management roles lead data centre hiring
Indeed's breakdown of the 2025-26 financial year shows the work spread well beyond the technicians on the data hall floor. IT infrastructure, operations and support roles made up 14.7 per cent of postings mentioning data centres, management 14.1 per cent and software development 12.6 per cent. Installation and maintenance followed at 8.9 per cent, electrical engineering at 8.7 per cent and industrial engineering at 7.1 per cent.
Management roles made up 14.1 per cent of data centre postings, within a point of IT infrastructure and operations, and ahead of software development. Job titles vary by employer. Hyperscalers tend to name the work directly, as in "Data Center Technician", while operators and developers often title roles by discipline, such as high-voltage infrastructure or construction delivery, so their hiring in the count is a floor. Australia's job statistics also carry no occupation code for data centre workers, which leaves job ads as the closest public measure. The trades behind the build are short in every state.
Data centres now feature in about one in 100 Australian job ads
Indeed's analysis, reported by ChannelLife on 2 October 2026, found around 1 per cent of Australian job postings mentioned data centres in August, nearly 2.5 times the share a year earlier. Searches for data centre roles were 160 per cent higher in August than in December 2025.
Over the three months to August, New South Wales held 48 per cent of Indeed's data centre posting activity, Victoria 28 per cent and Queensland 11 per cent. Indeed measures every posting that mentions data centres, while the Certified Strategic count keeps only ads that are data centre roles in themselves and leans towards Melbourne in the employers it reads directly. The two land within two points of each other on New South Wales.
Callam Pickering, Indeed's senior Asia Pacific economist, said "Job creation thus far has been concentrated heavily on Australia's east coast" and "Australia is at the beginning of its largest investment boom since the 2000s."
What to watch
Zerra's next hires. The 17 roles are the delivery leadership. Site, trades and operations hiring for the first leased building would follow them, and could show up in the tracking on the data centre jobs board.
The Western Downs decision. Western Downs Regional Council is assessing the application, alongside community benefit talks with the developer, and construction on the campus starts after an approval.
Queensland's share of the count. Weekly tracking on a consistent basis started on 1 October 2026, and a Queensland share moving off 2 per cent would be the first sign of the state's build reaching the data centre roles.