NEXTDC to Develop $1.3 Billion Data Centre in Melbourne

Australia’s leading data centre-as-a-service provider, on Thursday announced a $1.3 billion commitment to develop M4 Melbourne — a next-generation digital campus in Port Melbourne.

M4 Melbourne will feature an AI Factory, Mission Critical Operations Centre, and Technology Centre of Excellence. Purpose-built for sovereign AI, HPC, advanced manufacturing and deep tech, the campus strengthens Australia’s competitive edge across the Five Eyes and positions Victoria as a national digital infrastructure hub.

NEXTDC CEO and Managing Director Craig Scroggie said that the proposed facility was not just a data centre but a critical infrastructure for Australia’s AI future.

“M4 has been designed to meet the five critical imperatives for Australia’s AI future such as speed, scale, sovereign capability, sustainability, and security,” Scroggie said.

NEXTDC’s Fishermans Bend campus brings together three core facilities:

AI Factory: A hyper-dense, liquid-cooled facility engineered for sovereign AI. Designed to support NVIDIA’s Blackwell and Rubin Ultra architectures, it will deliver rack densities beyond 1,000kW — enabling model training, inference, and frontier AI workloads at scale.

Mission Critical Operations Centre (MCX): A sovereign-grade, always-on control centre housed within Tier IV infrastructure. MCX provides secure, fault-tolerant environments for high-stakes digital operations — from defence to enterprise and government — where uptime and trust are non-negotiable.

Technology Centre of Excellence: A national hub for AI skills, R&D, and innovation. It will support engineers, students, and start-ups to build and operate AI systems onshore — accelerating Australia’s capability in deep tech.

Some of the highlights of the planned AI infrastructure include up to 150 MW of power across 50,000 sq. m. of mission-critical facilities, liquid cooling systems supporting rack densities exceeding 1,000 kW, on-site solar and microgrids to drive energy sustainability, waste heat recovery for district-level energy reuse, recycled wastewater cooling enabled through utility integration among others.

Designed as a regional hub for hyperscale AI, defence workloads, and sovereign systems, M4 strengthens Australia’s position in the global AI infrastructure race — delivering secure, sustainable, and future-ready capacity at scale.

According to Scroggie, compute is the new electricity, just as electricity powered the industrial age, sovereign AI infrastructure will power the next one.

Premier of Victoria Jacinta Allan said that this investment means thousands of jobs, training for the next generation of tech workers, and cements Victoria’s reputation as the centre of innovation. They were open for business, and backing Victorians every step of the way.”

Jobs, Innovation and Sovereign Capability

M4 is expected to support thousands of high-value jobs across AI, digital infrastructure, defence technology and advanced research. The campus will be a national platform for secure cloud, sovereign AI, and mission-critical digital workloads — enabling Australia to grow its AI economy.

Scroggie also said that precincts matter as they create the gravitational pull for investment, innovation, and talent. By anchoring M4 at Fishermans Bend, they were activating a nationally integrated ecosystem for industrial AI, defence, research, and deep tech.

“No one builds the future alone. M4 will be the convergence point for partners shaping Australia’s AI era, from NVIDIA’s global leadership to our top-tier universities, to defence leaders building sovereign capability. This is where intelligence infrastructure, collaboration, and execution meet,” he added.