Focus keyword: Project Mars data centre
Image alt: Project Mars data centre Lane Cove West industrial site near homes
The Project Mars data centre that was meant to rise on Mars Road in Lane Cove West is off the books. Goodman Group told the NSW planning department on Monday it will not proceed with the $1.2 billion application.
Head of planning Guy Smith cited “emerging federal and state policy” and community feedback. The company started work on the file in March 2025. The rules around large AI halls have moved since then, the letter said.
Residents had already won the argument on the ground. The state-significant plan drew 374 public submissions. Nine were in favour.
Why the Project Mars data centre failed the street test
The building would have been three storeys and about 28 metres high, running 24 hours. Figures published during the fight put the plant at roughly 81 to 90 megawatts. The nearest house sits about 20 metres from the lot. Lane Cove West Public School is about 160 metres to the north-east.
Goodman last week told a Senate inquiry into AI and data centres that the project had not won a “social licence.” Liberal senator Sarah Henderson called the proposal “wholly unreasonable” and said it showed contempt for local residents.
Sydney Water said it could not back the file without a clearer water number. Published estimates put cooling demand around 1.4 million litres of drinking water a day. Ausgrid flagged electrocution and fire risk. Plans included about a million litres of diesel on site and a bank of backup generators.
Lane Cove’s mayor wants a pause on similar builds until the state writes tighter rules. The site sits in an industrial pocket that already hosts other halls. Locals feared Mars Road would become a corridor.
Policy moved while the DA sat there
NSW has been pushing a fast-track path for big data centres that can skip the usual council vote. Canberra, in the same week, has been talking social licence for racks after the OpenAI Medicare incident. Goodman’s letter treats those two tracks as one reason to walk.
Project Mars is the third Australian data-centre plan pulled in five months. Community campaigns sank a $600 million file in Hazelmere, Perth, in May, and another in Katoomba in June. AirTrunk is still scaling a 1.2-gigawatt campus at Kemps Creek in Sydney’s west.
Westpac has put the national pipeline near $175 billion. A large share of that is pencilled for the next three years. Lane Cove shows the bit that does not show up in the capital-raise slide: a school fence, a water main, and 365 submissions that said no.
Goodman remains one of Australia’s 20 largest listed companies. The withdrawal does not kill its wider data-centre book. It does set a marker. If the hall has to sit 20 metres from a kitchen window, the DA now has to survive the street as well as the planner.
