Data Centres Australia hands out inaugral Excellence Awards

The inaugural Data Centres Australia Excellence Awards have been held at the Palladium, Crown Melbourne, recognising achievement across seven categories in data centre innovation, leadership and sustainable development.

The ceremony brought together senior leaders from across Australia's data centre ecosystem and, in its first year, honoured three individuals with the peer-nominated Industry Achievement Award for building the sector to its current global standing.

Robin Khuda, founder and chief executive of AirTrunk; Greg Boorer, founder and chief executive of CDC Data Centres; and Craig Scroggie, chief executive and managing director of NEXTDC, were jointly recognised.

The awards said the three had, over 15 or more years, built data centre businesses of international scale on Australian soil, collectively attracting tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment and establishing Australia as a Tier 1 data centre market.

Equinix took out Data Centre of the Year for its SY5 facility in Sydney, which serves more than 4,900 enterprises and 10,500 customers globally. The judges recognised an engineering upgrade that augmented existing data halls to support more than 150% of their original design capacity without rebuilding, alongside demonstrated sustainability outcomes.

Access Covers Australia won the Ecosystem Partner of the Year award for its pit and cover solutions delivered across major sector projects, with the judges citing precision at large scale and project time and cost savings.

GreenSquare's MEL1 data centre community engagement programme took the Community and Stakeholder Engagement award, recognised for proactive engagement with local communities beyond planning requirements and at senior executive level.

CDC Data Centres won the Sustainability Excellence award, with judges recognising a portfolio of 16 facilities that have 100% offset energy use with renewables, used minimal-water cooling since 2007, and achieved net zero operations four years ahead of plan.

NEXTDC and Vertiv jointly won the Innovation Achievement award for the NEXTDC Liquid Cooling Centre of Excellence - a live, liquid-cooled AI environment inside the NEXTDC S3 Sydney facility that lets customers test and tune AI hardware configurations under real operating conditions.

Microsoft won the Workforce Development award for its Data Centre Academy, a fully funded programme co-designed with educational institutions that provides curriculum, certifications, mentoring and direct employment pathways for data centre roles. The programme has achieved a 100% graduation rate and recently expanded from New South Wales to Victoria.