PGIM Plots $1.2bn Data Centre for 20ha Truganina Site

PGIM has acquired a 20.7ha site in Melbourne’s west for $165.6 million—the first Australian investment for its $2-billion Global Data Centre Fund.

The US-based asset manager, which is the real estate arm of Prudential Financial, picked up the site at 1 Oroya Drive in Truganina, 22km west of the Melbourne CBD, for $8 million per hectare.

PGIM intends to invest $1.2 billion in the first of three planned development phases at the site.

Its global head of data centre investments Morgan Laughlin said Australia was an attractive location for data centre development.

“Demand for digital infrastructure has remained strong with many leading hyperscalers announcing plans to develop or take up a significant amount of capacity in and around Melbourne,” Laughlin said.

PGIM has applied to the Victorian Government’s Development Facilitation Program for expedited planning approval.

Laughlin told media that Melbourne’s relative power and land availability compared to Sydney made it a key focus for AI-driven growth.

“We’re capable of building a lot more than the initial 80 megawatts that we have planned, but that will be driven by future power availability,” he said.

The company is conducting due diligence on a second site closer to Melbourne’s CBD.

PGIM’s Asia Pacific pipeline now exceeds 400 megawatts across the region, after the acquisition of a site in eastern Osaka, Japan during the first half of 2025.

▲ PGIM global head of Data Centre Investments Morgan Laughlin and a rendering of the Equinix SY9x International Business Exchange (IBX) in Sydney.

PGIM Real Estate has operated data centres in Australia since 2022 through joint ventures with Equinix, including the SY9x facility in Sydney’s Rosehill.

The Truganina acquisition is the Global Data Centre Fund’s first Australian investment as PGIM looks to move into markets across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

The Osaka site is slated for a four-storey, 55-megawatt data centre building suitable for cloud and artificial intelligence workloads.

PGIM completed around $3 billion of transactions across sectors in the Asia-Pacific region in 2025.

Other recently planned data centre developments in Victoria include Singaporean asset manager Keppel’s proposed $10-billion hub at Morwell, 150km east of Melbourne, which would reportedly be Australia’s largest AI campus.