NextDC Wins Development Approval for $1.3B Melbourne Data Centre Campus

Australian data centre operator NextDC has secured development approval from the state of Victoria for a 150-megawatt digital infrastructure campus in Melbourne at an investment of A$2 billion ($1.3 billion).

The M4 campus will anchor the Fishermans Bend Innovation Precinct as a nationally strategic hub for advanced manufacturing, aerospace, sovereign defence and deep tech like artificial intelligence, NextDC CEO and managing director Craig Scroggie said Friday in a LinkedIn post. The news follows last month’s announcement that NextDC had joined forces with ChatGPT maker OpenAI on the development of a hyperscale campus in western Sydney.

First previewed last June, the M4 project occupies the site of the former Westgate Park Printing Complex in Port Melbourne, located on a curve of the Yarra River west of the city centre. The campus is designed to support rack densities of 1,000 kilowatts with cooling supplied by non-potable recycled water.

“This isn’t just a data centre,” Scroggie said. “It is critical infrastructure for Australia’s AI future. Digital infrastructure is economic infrastructure. AI factories are a new class of industrial asset, purpose-built for sovereign capability, resilience and long-term competitiveness.”

From Printing to Processing

Formerly a key printing plant for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp publishing empire, the M4 site at 127 Todd Road is expected to house more than 50,000 square metres (538,196 square feet) of digital infrastructure facilities. The development will support Nvidia’s latest Blackwell and Rubin Ultra chip architectures, enabling model training, inference and frontier AI workloads at scale, according to Brisbane-based NextDC.

Melbourne had roughly 417MW of data centre inventory at the end of the first half of 2025, JLL said in its Data Centre Market Dynamics report. The Victoria capital had more than 1.1 gigawatts of planned capacity and 361MW under construction.

“Melbourne is currently viewed as the preferred AI market for Australia due to cheaper power and land costs as well as significantly faster development planning pathways,” the consultancy said.

A timeline for M4’s completion wasn’t provided. The project is touted as supporting thousands of high-value jobs by acting as a convergence point for industry, government and academia.

“We’re open for business and we’re backing Victorians every step of the way,” said Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan. “This major investment means more jobs and training for the next generation of tech workers.”

Keppel Secures Land, Power

The green light for NextDC’s Melbourne megaproject came on the same week that Singapore-based Keppel Ltd announced that its data centre arm had secured the rights to lease a 123 hectare (304 acre) site in rural Victoria with a gross power capacity of up to 720MW from Australian energy and infrastructure landowner Lightwood Group.

The deal will see Keppel pay Lightwood an annual fee to gain early access to the Morwell site for pre-development works before the Temasek-backed group’s private data centre funds take up long-term leases.

Also last week, Singapore-based AGP Sustainable Real Assets unveiled Zerra DC, a rebrand of AGP’s data centre business, with a focus on developing and operating hyperscale data centre campuses. Zerra DC, which has offices in Sydney and Melbourne, aims to deliver large-scale capacity in markets driven by cloud and AI growth, with flexible campus developments and a leadership team dedicated to sustainability, responsible development and regional expansion, according to a LinkedIn post.

Australia’s live data centre capacity is forecast to rise from 1.4GW in 2025 to 1.8GW within three years, resulting in a supply gap of 700MW-1.7GW by 2028, according to a CBRE.