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9 Jun 2026, by Amy Sarcevic
The world’s largest radio telescope, SKA-Low, will soon be delighting astronomers with its ability to detect 13-billion-year-old data from stars, galaxies and black holes; and answer crucial questions about the universe.
But with 131,072 antennas sprawling across 74km of remote land, the project is equally being recognised by engineers as one of Australia’s most ambitious fixed-network deployments.
Indeed, the project, delivered by Ventia as the SKA Observatory’s primary infrastructure contractor in Australia, uses a sophisticated digital setup.
To support its 512 antenna stations, there is one main data centre at the heart, positioned between eighteen smaller ones, on the outskirts.
Ventia’s Executive GM of Energy & Renewables, Agathe Gross, says these facilities – each supported by high-performance computing – are crucial to power the telescope’s bandwidth and latency requirements.
“The telescope will generate nearly one terabyte of data every second, and almost three petabytes each year. To handle this, we absolutely needed data centres to be located on site near the antenna field stations,” she said.
Making it happen
Exactly how this infrastructure will be delivered adds an extra layer of complexity.
Located in Wajarri Yamaji Country in remote Western Australia, the project is proving to be a high-definition example of remote-area deployment, environmental stewardship and supply chain performance.
“Essentially, it’s an enormous conglomeration of energy, power, water and digital infrastructure in the middle of the Australian desert,” Agathe said.
“It’s a harsh environment for any infrastructure project – let alone one of this scale and with such a large appetite for resources. It represents one of the most extreme cases of data centre engineering we have ever been involved with – and I believe Australia has seen so far.”
With the average data centre using 10-1000 megawatts of electricity in 24 hours, power access is a particular challenge. As is water supply – around 1-19 million litres of which is needed daily to cool down equipment for a single, average facility.
“Throughout Australia, water is becoming scarcer and, as we scale, we need to be especially mindful of how we consume these precious resources,” Agathe said. “This means being efficient with our consumption and, where possible, using technology to prevent wastage.”
As an organisation that services major infrastructure across telecommunications, water and electricity, Ventia is uniquely positioned to understand and manage these challenges.
“Data centres operate on the same fundamentals as any critical infrastructure asset and that’s where our deep and broad infrastructure expertise is an advantage.”
“As always, when it comes to project delivery, safety remains the number one focus. I think what we do best is delivering, consistent quality and safe work for our customers and for our teams,” Agathe said.
Countering workforce woes
In the desert, workforce challenges are a further challenge. Australia is currently waist-deep in a technical worker shortage, and in remote areas, the talent pool is stretched even thinner.
“There’s undoubtedly an upcoming shortage of electrical workers and we expect this will worsen with the rollout of transmission projects across Australia – so we are taking the matter seriously now,” Agathe said.
“This means we’re starting to engage more in partnerships with our customers to help them understand how they can really get that number of people with a certain number of hours to meet their outcomes.”
Ventia has so far seen great success with its “Four B’s” workforce strategy: Build, Buy, Borrow and Bot.
“We’re building our workforce through apprenticeships. This also enables bringing more diversity in this market. Currently, women represent only 3-4 percent of people in the electrical trade, but we are bringing more women into our apprenticeship program to help change that.
On the “buying” strategy, Ventia acquired PowerNet in July 2026 – a specialised HC services company with a highly skilled workforce based in Wodonga and delivering Substation projects across Australia.
“We keep looking for other opportunities to grow our workforce,” Agathe said.
As part of its borrowing strategy, Ventia will be redeploying workers from an industrial background, such as rail, oil and gas, and coal plant maintenance.
To fulfil menial work, it is turning to bots, with what Agathe describes as an “open-minded” attitude towards AI automation.
“We are making the best of drone capabilities at the moment, especially for inspections. Our long-term goal is to maximise the use of bots where it can free up human capital. We have seen robots laying bricks, houses being 3D printed, so it’s a real possibility that they could soon meaningfully contribute to build substations and lines, and we are keen to see how this landscape evolves,” she said.
Social license
Social license can also be an uphill battle for any project of this nature. Rural communities often resist electrical assets on their land, with large easements threatening to impact their business operations. Data centres face similar objections from residents who do not wish to see them from their properties.
“The challenge for SKA-low has been balancing location requirements with community acceptance. Data centres cannot be placed more than 500,000 kilometres away because of their latency requirements, so we have had to work hand-in-hand with communities to ensure everyone is happy for us to progress.”
Beyond SKA-Low
Given these challenges, the SKA-Low project is shining a spotlight on what it will take to power data centres of the future. Agathe says these will be a “different beast” to many of the facilities we are used to seeing.
“The next wave of data centres won’t be standalone facilities – they’ll be integrated utility ecosystems and success will depend on how well power, water and digital infrastructure are planned and delivered together,” Agathe said.
“What data centres are dealing with now – scale, complexity, resource constraints – we’ve been managing in other critical infrastructure environments for years. It’s a natural extension of that capability.”
Further insight
For more on how Ventia is tackling these challenges, join Ventia representatives, Michael Riad, GM Data Centre and Wade Rugless, Technical Manager, Strategy & Growth – Infrastructure Services at the Australian Data Centre Power & Water Summit.
This year’s conference will be held 10-11 June 2026 at the Swissotel Sydney.
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