Projects
Enhancing speed to market while reducing risk for data centre developers
Sep 04 , 2026
How integrated thinking helps reduce project risk while improving speed to market.
Australia’s data centre market is entering a period of unprecedented growth. There are currently 147 existing data centres in the country, with a further 64 in planning. 60 facilities across nine locations have already been certified by government as strategically important.
A recent Mandala Partners report puts a number on the opportunity. The report looks at economic benefits and jobs supported by building data centres. It states, “Australia’s current 1.6GW of capacity has already created $13.8 billion in economic activity and supports 9,000 people in the data centre ecosystem. With forecast capacity now expected to reach 3.9GW by 2030, that would drive a further $19.8b of economic activity, create 19,000 construction jobs and a further 23,000 ongoing direct and indirect jobs.”
Little wonder the sector is attracting developers, investors, utilities and governments in equal measure.
Much of the public conversation understandably focuses on planning approvals, power availability, water consumption and sustainability. While these are genuine and material constraints, and every developer entering this market needs to understand them, there are other factors which are defining the success of digital infrastructure builds.
The initial demand for data capacity saw size as the dominant consideration for data centre development. As a result, the industry conversation justifiably centred on latency, connectivity and technical capability.
The exponential demand for data has seen developers, investors and hyperscale customers increasingly asking other questions first: where can I secure power, where can I secure land, how do I gain access to water, and how quickly can capacity actually be made available?
Operators across the market are increasingly seeking to dramatically compress delivery timelines. In some cases they are pursuing build programs roughly half the length of what was considered standard only a few years ago. The lesson is clear. Speed to capacity is becoming the primary competitive advantage in this market, ahead of almost anything else.
This need for speed reframes the conversation entirely. Organisations wanting to succeed in this market will not simply be the ones building the most capacity. They will be the ones who are able to remove the most uncertainty from delivering that capacity.
Speed to operation is being written into contracts. In the US market, more hyperscale leases are setting fixed rent start dates. If the facility is not ready on time, the developer pays a penalty or gives the tenant free rent. With Australian development often mirroring US trends, we can expect delivery certainty will not just have operational implications, but will carry real financial cost.
While current conditions still allow relatively fast approvals in most jurisdictions, there is a clear shift from reactive, project-by-project approvals towards mandatory national and state frameworks – a coordinated project planning approach designed to manage surging energy and water demand.
This will likely mean developers will need to underwrite new renewable energy generation, and fund upgrades and connection to water networks, fully funding their share of connection upgrades, offsetting consumption directly, rather than passing those costs back to local networks, utilities and communities.
This adds time to design, stakeholder engagement and approvals.
Recently proposed reforms aimed at accelerating planning approvals in NSW are a positive step for the industry and have the potential to remove one of the traditional barriers to delivery. However, shortening approval timelines will place even greater emphasis on the effectiveness of parallel workstreams. Design finalisation, long-lead equipment procurement, utility connections, community and stakeholder buy-in, contractor engagement and specialist vendor mobilisation will increasingly become the determining factors in overall programme performance.
For developers seeking to achieve meaningful schedule savings, the critical question is no longer how quickly permits can be obtained, but whether the broader delivery ecosystem is sufficiently aligned to capitalise on those gains.
This requires a reassessment of how the project as a whole is delivered. It requires greater transparency, genuine collaboration, effective interface management, the early implementation of programme logic, clear delivery strategies and the application of project controls frameworks to understand where the true schedule drivers lie and where genuine opportunities for acceleration can be realised.
Many of the issues which have faced data centre delivery in the past remain relevant. The availability of power goes beyond network connection and grid capacity. With energy arrangements locking up availability for years, the risk to data centre operability is real.
The need for water is a known factor. The challenge for developers is understanding the complexities of the water sector and the challenges of ageing infrastructure, and how commercial arrangements can be created for the mutual benefit of both developer and utility.
Land approvals require significant stakeholder engagement and management. The availability of skilled resources and long-lead items, in a highly competitive market, need a clear, robust solution to deliver confidence to investors.
The key lesson is, data centres cannot be planned in isolation.
By developing an integrated approach, solutions to these questions can be developed.
None of the above changes the fundamental challenge developers face. It simply raises the cost of getting the delivery strategy wrong. With that in mind, we see three interesting questions:
Historically, major infrastructure projects followed a relatively linear lifecycle: design, approval, procurement, construction, then commissioning at the end of the program before handover.
While this is changing in many sectors, the demand for speed-to-market is rewarding developers who are prepared to look outside the box. With power certainty, land availability, resource demand and water connection the new imperatives, and with design, application and approval required before work can start on site, a project can effectively begin six to twelve months before Day Zero.
Any idle time in those months before construction begins costs money. Value can be realised through everything from building flexibility into procurement practices to iterative scenario modelling, from reimaging the potential of supply chains to finding new ways to assure labour availability. While each project has its own unique challenges, fresh thinking is finding new ways to improve speed to market, de-risk delivery and realise value.
There is a genuine benefit in applying procurement thinking beyond the purchase.
More and more, we are seeing the benefits procurement delivers value through the implementation of collaborative models and processes. This move to more connected thinking is adding value through improving speed to market by reducing delays and aligning efforts across all parties, reducing risk through mutual and transparent effort.
By developing and implementing these collaborative models across a range of sectors, identifying and engaging Capability Partners and Delivery Partners for major complex infrastructure projects, MBB is seeing greater appetite from developers, contractors and suppliers.
By considering development activities as parallel paths, not a linear process, time to completion can be shortened. Concurrent activities can include:
Long-lead procurement – starting procurement early, particularly procurement of long-lead components, provides faster more pointed market engagement and, using feedback from constructors and component manufacturers, allows market feedback to influence design.
Proactive project controls – enhancing speed to market by de-risking delivery. By implementing project controls frameworks and thinking at the design stage, developers can leverage the knowledge of delivery challenges to influence and clarify the procurement and design phases, delivering more accurate estimates and more robust schedules.
Pre-transaction management – establishing a strong foundation for tendering should begin before the approval is finalised. Flexibility is key. Even as designs are being defined, activities such as document development, tender strategy, evaluation frameworks can all start while approvals are pending.
The developers who recognise this early, and structure their project accordingly, are the ones who consistently outperform on speed to market.
One of the most common misconceptions in large-scale development is the project schedule is driven primarily by construction activity. In data centres, this is often simply not true.
Data centre scheduling is fundamentally different from many other infrastructure sectors. The schedule is no longer driven by concrete and steel.
Many of the most significant schedule risks sit outside the construction program altogether.
Long-lead electrical equipment can influence delivery timelines years before it is installed. Utility energisation requirements can dictate critical milestones on their own timetable. Controls integration and network readiness routinely involve multiple parties working to different schedules. Testing, commissioning and operational readiness can ultimately determine whether a facility is genuinely Ready for Service, regardless of how complete the building looks.
A facility can appear substantially finished and still be months away from generating revenue if its systems cannot be energised, integrated, tested and commissioned on time.
The challenge is not simply managing activities.
The challenge is managing interfaces.
Modern data centres rely on an ecosystem of stakeholders – developers, utilities, technology providers, equipment manufacturers, design consultants, construction contractors, commissioning specialists, network providers, operations teams and regulators. Each is responsible for one component of the final solution, but no single component delivers value on its own. The facility only becomes operational when every element functions together as an integrated system.
Small delays in one workstream cascade quickly across others: a delayed transformer affects energisation, delayed energisation affects testing, delayed testing affects commissioning, delayed commissioning affects customer readiness. The further a project progresses, the more expensive these delays become. The need is for a programme that can absorb these knock-on effects rather than compound them.
The best-performing projects identify and actively manage these interfaces long before they turn critical – which is exactly where project controls, done properly, earns its place at the table.
Delays in planning approvals are often viewed as the primary threat to programme delivery. In reality, they are frequently only the first in a series of interconnected challenges.
Construction commencement may be pushed back while approvals are finalised, but the programme does not automatically recover once permits are secured. By the time work begins on site, latent site conditions may have emerged, designs may have continued to evolve, and customer requirements introduced later in the development process can drive further scope changes.
At the same time, long-lead equipment procurement remains a major source of uncertainty. Even where procurement activities have commenced early, manufacturing constraints, global supply chain pressures and logistics challenges can introduce further delays that impact installation, energisation and commissioning milestones. Specialist resources such as electricians, controls engineers and commissioning teams are also in high demand, with multiple projects competing for the same limited pool of expertise.
The greater challenge is therefore not simply securing planning approval. It is coordinating the hundreds of interdependent activities required to transform an approved site into an operational facility, while building a programme capable of absorbing inevitable disruptions rather than allowing them to cascade throughout the project lifecycle.
With projects and programs becoming more complex, requiring more input from more diverse organisations, we are seeing more organisations opt to maintain a central, highly experienced team, and trust specialist partners to conduct specialist services on projects.
By treating a project as a system, with each component part, the strategy, the transaction, the delivery all simply part of an overall, aligned delivery. A well-run system allows specialists to trust other functions while creating an environment where everyone can operate jointly and coherently together.
The use of collaborative models allows greater transparency between workstreams, encouraging early consideration of solutions which can reduce friction and risk through delivery. This includes considerations such as commercial models, collaborative procurement and the early adoption of project controls thinking.
Too often, project controls are treated as a reporting function – a team mobilised after contracts are awarded, producing schedules, cost reports and monthly updates. Those activities matter, but they are only a fraction of what effective project controls can contribute.
Project controls should be leveraged before construction starts.
In the data centre environment, properly established project controls can positively influence decision-making from the earliest stages of development – well before construction, and ideally before procurement strategy is locked in. Robust planning, estimating, scheduling and risk management give project teams real insight into how a delivery strategy will actually perform before major commitments are made. Done well, project controls helps answer the questions that matter most:
Project estimates without the support of robust controls thinking can be close. Or they can be a long way off. Properly sequenced controls frameworks provide far greater insight into probable cost, schedule shift and risk as a project progresses. This provides a much stronger foundation for forward estimates, and in defending decisions and claims later.
Project controls logic, applied earlier in the development cycle, can provide:
MBB sees project controls as an enabler, not just a reporting tool. Our Planning, Project Controls and Risk team has great depth of experience developing and implementing schedules and cost estimates that stand up to the rigour of delivering mission critical infrastructure in genuinely dynamic operating conditions. Identifying trends early enough in the process to actually change outcomes.
Our bespoke project intelligence platform, elli Analytics, provides clients with the power to model delivery scenarios and clearly see the implications of critical decisions on cost, scope and schedule, sooner.
There are two very real considerations for developers seeking value for money which does not risk delivery or long-term operability. These are found in the structure of the development team and in the supply chain.
Integrating and aligning services across the value chain, from investor to developer to constructor to operator, reduces the number of hard deal interfaces in a project and allows the relationships between parties to actively drive faster, more innovative solutions, rather than just managing handoffs between them.
Just as importantly, it allows downstream intelligence to inform upstream decisions.
A clearer understanding of commissioning and operational demands, fed into design and delivery planning before plans are finalised, de-risks delivery early. This upstream application of project controls logic can provide significant savings, allowing changes to be made before it is too expensive to make changes. This is where properly applied project controls logic earns its keep.
A greater sense of control
A vertically integrated delivery model allows development partners to better plan for delivery variables. Through more accurate scenario modelling, construction partners gain the opportunity to conduct more accurate due diligence, better identifying potential capability gaps or opportunities to partner with specialist providers. It means less uncertainty over time and cost, allowing organisations to bake costs into a pricing model.
Traditional supply chain thinking treats each part of the delivery lifecycle – procurement, construction, operations – as an individual piece to be managed on its own terms. While logical, it can create disconnected decision-making.
Value chain thinking seeks to optimise the performance of the whole delivery ecosystem rather than its individual parts. In practice, this means involving delivery partners earlier, using construction insight to inform design, and understanding operational requirements before procurement decisions are locked in.
Value chain thinking means aligning the efforts of every stakeholder to genuinely work toward the same customer outcome, not just their own piece of it. This matters even more on multi-phased hyperscale campuses and the emerging wave of AI factories, where capacity is released in stages – decisions made on an early phase directly shape what is possible, and how fast, on every phase that follows.
MBB has deep experience in supporting clients to develop and operate genuinely integrated delivery models. Models that work across the full development and delivery lifecycle, from strategic development, commercial and contract modelling, market and stakeholder engagement, to procurement and transaction management, aligning the efforts of multiple organisations behind one outcome-focused delivery strategy.
If your organisation is developing, financing or delivering data centre capacity and wants a clearer view of where your schedule and cost risk actually sits, get in touch.
To find out how MBB can help, please contact: