Microsoft country manager Vanessa Sorenson said the centre was the most sustainable hyperscale centre in its portfolio. Photo: Supplied
Global tech giant Microsoft opens its first hyperscale data centre in New Zealand on Thursday, which is expected to give businesses and organisations access to tools designed to super-charge productivity.
Microsoft country manager Vanessa Sorenson said the New Zealand centre was the most sustainable hyperscale centre in its portfolio, with data centres in more than 60 locations around the world.
Microsoft paid Contact Energy $300 million in 2022 to support the development of the Te Huka Unit 3 geothermal facility, alongside a contract to buy renewable energy over the next 10 years.
She said the centre offered the most mature technology available with an opportunity to overlay artificial intelligence, which will drive much needed improvements in productivity.
"I hope New Zealand businesses and government truly, truly understand about the size and scale of what we're launching," adding the cloud capacity would enable local innovators to grow on a global scale," Sorenson said.
"This is a full region, three-zone (buildings) centre, which is something that we never thought would ever come to New Zealand because of our size."
The location of the data centre, somewhere on Auckland's North Shore, was commercially sensitive and therefore undisclosed, with customers such as the multinational intelligence alliance Five Eyes, dairy cooperative Fonterra and ASB Bank.
She said holding New Zealand's sensitive data within the country addressed a critical security issue.
"If I was a bank, I could never imagine my banking infrastructure being on public cloud - now I can," she said, adding the processing speed was world-class.
"For our public sector, we could finally have the taxation system on public cloud."
Retraining the workforce part of the package
Sorenson said productivity gains would require the wide-spread upskilling of New Zealand workforce to make the most of the opportunities.
Microsoft was partnering with educational services to upskill 100,000 people with training over the next two years.
"The certifications will be free, they will be online, and we'll hand-hold and take people through the journey.
"We see it is an enabler for more organizations to leverage gen-AI (generative artificial intelligence) than ever before."
Microsoft's total investment in training and development of the data centre was not disclosed.
However, Sorenson said it was a large-scale investment of many hundreds of millions of dollars, with room to expand in-country and in the cloud.
"And so let's see. I mean, we have bought more land to expand. We do see New Zealand as an incredible country to invest in, especially with our renewable contract with Contact," she said.
"We want to grow. We've been in the country for near on 40 years. This investment is going to have us here for the next 50 to 100. This is about the long game. . . we are definitely a country that Microsoft globally has seen as a worthy investment."
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