The cost
stack

Three small-multiples, sized to one another. Capex, opex, refresh — line by line. Lines marked with an accent pip carry an Australian premium named in the prose underneath.

Capex anchored at AUD 45 million per megawatt — at the upper end of the AUD 35–45M indicative range for premium colocation at Sydney metro, erred high deliberately. At twenty-eight megawatts: deployed capital AUD 1,260M, drawn over twelve to eighteen months with capitalised interest through energisation.

Two lines move the IRR; the rest is hygiene. Power infrastructure is the largest, with the binding lead-time at the transformer slot (Hitachi Energy, GE Vernova, Siemens, ABB run two to three years). Shell and civil works run twenty-five to forty per cent above US Sun Belt comparables. Senior infrastructure debt prices seventy-five to one hundred and twenty-five basis points wider than US equivalent.

At full utilisation: AUD 33M per year against AUD 149M of contracted revenue — twenty-two per cent of revenue, generous for a premium boutique service tier. Power dominates by an order of magnitude over the next-largest line.

Wholesale energy carries the most volatility. NEM pool prices in NSW averaged AUD 90–110 per megawatt-hour through 2025–26; a four-cent move in delivered power on a 28 MW site is roughly AUD 8–10M per year. Site staffing is the second-largest line, and the place the boutique service tier earns its premium — roughly thirty to thirty-five FTE at twenty-eight megawatts, with sovereign-cleared personnel at a scarcity premium where the customer mix admits classified workloads.

Cumulative refresh lands at AUD 180M across thirty years — about fourteen per cent of original deployed capital, in four events at years six, twelve, eighteen, and twenty-eight. Front-light, back-heavy: UPS battery cycles run small early; the mid-life transformer and cooling refresh at year eighteen is the largest single event; the year-twenty-eight envelope-and-cooling refresh runs at a similar scale ahead of the terminal sale. Land and grid connection rights are perpetual. The build is liquid-ready from the outset; a retrofit liquid-cooling intervention would add AUD 30–80M and is excluded.

Three layers sit inside the facility but outside the owner's exposure under triple-net: GPUs and accelerators, customer networking and storage, and the customer-side operations. At 28 MW the fully-fitted tenant compute layer at Blackwell-generation pricing runs AUD 800M to AUD 1.5B — comparable in absolute scale to the fixed infrastructure underneath it, but on a three-to-six-year economic life rather than thirty. Stacked on the same site; not the same asset. Conflating them is the most common underwriting error in the current cycle. The REIT-and-infrastructure-fund thesis owns the fixed layer; the tenant owns the compute. The recommendation underwrites the first.