The New Zealand government has been building a secret NZ$300 million (US$188m) data center at its Auckland air force base.

The project was announced by Defence and GCSB minister Andrew Little, who said that funding was first injected into the site in 2019. Since then, there have been 150 construction workers on site. The data center is expected to be finished in 2025.

The data center, housed at the Whenuapai air force base, was kept a secret until just last week as the government is attempting to be ‘more upfront about national security challenges.’

“Construction has progressed to the point it's now going to be visible and it's time to bring the public in," said Little.

The data center will be used to store protected government information from a variety of government agencies, but shouldn’t include lots of private data about individuals. Security is a big priority for the facility, which is why it has been constructed on a military base with existing high physical security.

Details about the facility and the contractors involved have not been shared.

New Zealand is seeing a lot of growth in its data center market. DCI is currently constructing its second Auckland data center, Datagrid has filed for a 100+MW data center to the south island, and AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure are working on clouds region in the country.