Australian Ford Falcon factory to become a data centre

Ford's famous Broadmeadows manufacturing site in Melbourne will become the location of a new data centre almost a decade after the automaker ended more than 90 years of producing cars in Australia.

According to The Urban Developer, the site at 300-340 Barry Road in Campbellfield will be developed by Singapore-based Zerra DC.

A planning permit lodged by Zerra with the Victorian state government proposes a six-building data centre campus on the historic site, including office space.

Having built cars in Geelong since 1925, Ford Australia opened the Broadmeadows plant in August 1959, before it introduced the first locally made Ford Falcon, codenamed XK, to showrooms the following year.

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With more than 5000 workers churning out more than 600 cars a day at its peak, the factory produced every generation of Falcon through to the final FG X, the Falcon-based Territory SUV, and long-wheelbase Fairlane and LTD models.

It also produced the Cortina small car and was the source of an ill-fated export program for the Ford Capri convertible, a Mazda MX-5 rival that ironically employed underpinnings from the Mazda 323-based Ford Laser.

The final vehicle, a Kinetic Blue-coloured FG X Falcon XR6 sedan, rolled off the Broadmeadows production line on October 7, 2016.

Ford Australia moved its Australian headquarters to the Melbourne suburb of Richmond the same year and sold the Broadmeadows plant to the Pelligra Group in 2019.

However, it continues to operate out of parts of the larger original 45-hectare site, including its heritage-listed building at 1735 Sydney Road, which remains Ford's Asia Pacific Product Development Centre.

Design and engineering departments are still functioning at the site, and special projects – such as the 2019 Ford Mustang R-Spec and the 2026 Ford Mustang Dark Horse T8-Spec pack – were also developed there.

It was also the ‘home room’ – or lead development centre – for the current Ford Ranger ute and the related Ford Everest SUV, alongside the company's engineering and test facility at the You Yangs Proving Ground in Lara, just north of Geelong.

While the data centre is not yet approved, the Broadmeadows plant looks set to follow the same fate as the site previously occupied by Holden Special Vehicles (HSV), whose headquarters were demolished in 2025 to become a data centre.

The former HSV site on Centre Road, Clayton, in Melbourne’s southeast, opened in 1954 when it began manufacturing Volkswagen Beetles.

Until HSV’s closure as a brand in 2020, and the demolition of buildings at the Clayton site last year, the location also served as a manufacturing facility for Datsun (the former name of Nissan’s passenger-car division) and Volvo.

While it housed HSV headquarters, it was also the base for the Holden Racing Team, whose legendary drivers included Peter Brock, Craig Lowndes, and Mark Skaife.

This month, the former GM Holden proving ground at Lang Lang was sold to an Australian defence contractor, ending decades of automotive testing and development at the rural Victorian facility.

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