The New South Wales Government has announced a nation-leading policy framework to deliver responsible investment in data centres, ensuring the development of this critical infrastructure is matched by investment in world-class energy, water and environmental infrastructure.
With the state positioning itself as a major destination for data centre development, the NSW Data Centre Policy Framework establishes new expectations around energy and water efficiency, environmental performance and infrastructure investment.
Over 19 data centre projects, valued at more than $50.3 billion, are currently in the State Significant Development pipeline, with a further 60 data centres already under construction or operational.
For stormwater infrastructure, this presents an opportunity to move beyond traditional drainage and detention applications. Stormwater can become part of a broader water management strategy — providing a source of recycled water while also helping data centres manage flooding, water quality and environmental obligations.
The NSW Data Centre Guidelines specifically recognise the need to reduce the risk that data centre demand exacerbates existing water pressures, particularly in Greater Sydney and drought-prone areas. The Guidelines state that data centres should use recycled water where available or implement offset measures where it is not.
Stormwater Harvesting: Sustainable Development & Recycled Water
Sourcing water sustainably is a particularly significant consideration under the new Guidelines, and Atlan Stormwater supports these objectives with more than 50 years’ experience in the design, manufacture and installation of water quantity and quality infrastructure.
Under the new Guidelines, data centre cooling is expected to use higher proportions of recycled water, either through agreements with water utility providers or through the installation of localised infrastructure to treat and reuse water.
This offers an opportunity for large data centre developments to utilise the substantial volumes of stormwater and rainwater captured from extensive roof and hardstand areas. Water quantity infrastructure such as MegaVault, AtlanCube, AtlanChamber and TankStor can be designed to capture this water and store it for reuse applications.
Our range of On-site Stormwater Detention (OSD) and retention tanks integrate directly with multiphase stormwater treatment trains and can be integrated directly with pump stations – allowing primary, secondary and tertiary stormwater treatment to be installed underground and connected with aboveground systems.
This creates an opportunity to design detention, retention and water-quality infrastructure as part of a broader recycled water system, rather than as independent stormwater assets. Ultimately, harvested stormwater and rainwater can be treated with fine filtration, UV and chlorination systems to reach the water quality requirements for cooling systems – before being stored in additional tanks.
Treatment Trains & Integrated Infrastructure
Stormwater systems can incorporate multiple layers of value for data centre projects – capturing, treating, storing and detaining stormwater across coordinated infrastructure.
For example, a roof catchment could contribute rainfall to a harvesting system, while high-risk operational areas such as transformers and backup generator areas can be separately treated through hydrocarbon separation. GPTs can capture sediment and gross pollutants before water enters storage, while tertiary filtration can provide additional treatment where required.
These different catchments can be routed to appropriate storage infrastructure, pump stations and complex filtration systems, allowing retained water to be effectively treated to high degrees of quality and redistributed to meet the diverse water requirements of data centre operations.
Partnering with Atlan Stormwater: Providing Generational Stormwater Assets
Data centres require infrastructure partners that can assist across full project lifecycles – from design to installation, and maintenance. At Atlan Stormwater, we support critical infrastructure with end-to-end service across complex site requirements that bridge water quality, water quantity, site risk, compliance, and long-term asset performance.
Atlan provides a locally manufactured stormwater product range covering primary, secondary and tertiary treatment, as well as detention, retention and stormwater harvesting. This allows us to ensure your project runs to schedule, and that treatment trains can be developed to meet your project-specific objectives. The result is a tailored approach that scales to meet the demands of data centre development.
For data centre developers and engineering teams, this means a single specialist provider can contribute across multiple stages of the stormwater strategy — from gross pollutant capture and hydrocarbon protection through to filtration, OSD, retention and harvesting.
We believe clean waterways are a right, not a privilege. We work every day in our urban catchments to develop generational infrastructure, ensuring projects.