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Developers of the Auckland Surf Park in Dairy Flat are holding a community open day on February 28 at Dairy Flat Primary School to update residents as the project heads into the next phase of its Fast-track application.
The original development was for a Wavegarden lagoon that included a co-located solar farm and a Spark data centre campus, (Hibiscus Matters, July 14, 2025).
The surf park will also feature high-performance sports and leisure facilities, eco-cabins and lodging accommodation, restaurants and public outdoor amenities including walking and cycling trails.
Project spokesperson Trevor McKeown says the open day is to give updates and take questions about the expansion of the 54 hectare project to include an integrated residential development comprising approximately 400 residential units, a village centre, a work-live precinct and associated activities, and a “hyperscale artificial intelligence data centre”. Since the centre was first proposed, Spark advised that it had sold a 75 per cent interest in its data centres to Pacific Equity Partners and the Dairy Flat Data centre will be run by a stand-alone company TenPeaks Data Centres. Overseas, many communities have raised concerns about the high resource usage of AI data centres.
CEO of TenPeaks Data Centres, Michael Stribling, says the Dairy Flat development has been designed to be highly sustainable, with the data centre intended to take energy from the solar farm, and reuse heat from the data centre to provide heating to the surf lagoon.
“The data centre is also designed to carefully use natural resources including water, and to adopt high sustainability design and practices. The development is targeting to achieve a LEED Silver environmental certification, which considers energy and water use, alongside a range of other sustainability factors. The data centre design utilises what is called a closed loop cooling system meaning it will not rely on fresh water as its primary means of cooling (versus the use of cooling towers in other data centre designs which can be more water intensive). The proposed data centre is being designed using energy efficient plant and equipment with very low water usage. On-site rainwater harvesting tanks will also be installed to support general water uses across the campus.
“The proposed data centre will comply with noise limits as set out in the Auckland Unitary Plan together with associated conditions of consent. Specialist acoustic engineers will oversee the design to ensure these requirements are achieved, and plant will be chosen to limit noise impact.”
Project ambassador Sir John Kirwan will attend the drop-in event, which will run from 9am to 1pm.
McKeown says groundworks at the site are well underway and the development is starting to take shape, with the opening planned for late 2028.
