Formerly secret spy data centre to open soon in West Auckland
Mock-up of a new data centre in West Auckland.
Photo:
Supplied
A tailor-made data centre for the country's most secret and sensitive public sector information is expected to open soon in West Auckland.
The $300m facility at the air force base in Whenuapai is a partnership between the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) spy agency and the Defence Force.
It was especially designed to meet New Zealand's "unique environment", the GCSB has said previously.
Begun in 2022, but announced only in 2023 "after security milestones had been achieved", the centre will provide extra secure storage for core information across government agencies.
It was on track to begin operating by the middle of the year, the spy agency said.
A main driver has been to get "additional protection against malign actors",
official papers showed
.
A lot of public agency data is held in data centres in Australia run by big US tech companies.
"The data centre is neither modelled on nor linked to an Australian centre," the GCSB said in 2023, in response to a request made under the Official Information Act.
"We did however seek to draw learnings from selected international partners about their data centres, given this is the first instance where we have built such a facility, noting we have a unique environment and different requirements than international partners."
A "non-sovereign" option offshore, or in a centre with offshore ownership, was ruled out early on.
The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)'s spy base at Waihopai, near Blenheim.
Photo:
Supplied
Planning dated back almost a decade, when a Cabinet committee in 2016 agreed on setting money aside following a security resourcing review.
"The facility needed to be within New Zealand, preferably on existing Crown land," the GCSB said. "Value for money was a strong factor, as was geographical diversity and resiliency."
The centre would "shore up the resilience of our secure data storage for at least another 25 years", the spy agency said in a statement.
The GCSB's appropriation in Budget 2025 of $262m was
about a fifth lower than what it spent last year
. There was "volatility from year to year as capital projects start and finish", it said.
Successive governments' policy of pushing to the 'cloud' had propelled a lot of agencies to switch from storing and processing data on-site, to using services and servers run by Microsoft, Amazon and Google, in Australia. The former two have been building large data centres in this country.
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