NextDC has announced a $2 billion commitment to develop M4 Melbourne — a next-generation digital campus at 127 Todd Road, Port Melbourne. M4 will consist of an AI Factory, Mission Critical Operations Centre, and Technology Centre of Excellence. It will be built for sovereign AI, HPC, advanced manufacturing and deep tech.
NextDC’s Fishermans Bend campus will bring 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 is hoped 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 will provide secure, fault-tolerant environments for high-stakes digital operations — from defence to enterprise and government.
Technology Centre of Excellence: A hub for AI skills, R&D, and innovation. It will support engineers, students, and start-ups to build and operate AI systems onshore.
“This investment positions Australia at the forefront of sustainable innovation—leveraging our world-class research in energy systems, the built environment, and sustainability to create a resilient, net-zero data centre precinct that seamlessly integrates next-generation computing, AI, and secure large-scale data storage," Director of Sustainable Technologies and System Enabling Impact Platform (EIP), of RMIT University, Gary Rosengarten, stated.
Inclusions of the planned infrastructure include: Up to 150MW of power across 50,000m² of facilities, liquid cooling systems supporting rack densities exceeding 1,000kW, on-site solar and microgrids to hopefully drive energy sustainability, waste heat recovery for district-level energy reuse, recycled wastewater cooling enabled through utility integration, software-defined optical fabrics delivering allegedly good AI performance, and Government and Defence-grade compliance: PSPF, SCEC, HCF, and DISP.
“M4 has been designed to meet the five critical imperatives for Australia’s AI future — speed, scale, sovereign capability, sustainability, and security,” Scroggie affirmed. “Compute is the new electricity. Just as electricity powered the industrial age, sovereign AI infrastructure will power the next one.”