NEXTDC — M4 Melbourne 'AI Factory'

NEXTDC’s M4 Melbourne is a $2 billion flagship “AI Factory” under construction in Fishermans Bend, Melbourne’s premier urban renewal precinct. With planned capacity of 150-162 MW across a purpose-built hyperscale campus, M4 represents Australia’s most ambitious single-site AI data center investment and a statement of NEXTDC’s ambition to anchor Australia’s sovereign AI compute ecosystem.

NEXTDC is Australia’s largest listed data center operator, with facilities in every major Australian city and a strategy centered on premium infrastructure for enterprise and hyperscale customers. The M4 designation follows NEXTDC’s campus numbering scheme for Melbourne (M1, M2, M3 exist in inner Melbourne) — but the “AI Factory” branding is new, explicitly signaling the facility’s GPU-cluster-first design philosophy rather than the traditional colocation model.

Fishermans Bend is Melbourne’s inner-city industrial transformation zone — a former manufacturing and port services district that the Victorian government is redeveloping into a mixed-use innovation and residential precinct. The location provides access to Melbourne’s industrial-grade power grid, fiber infrastructure running along the Yarra River corridor, and proximity to Melbourne CBD enterprise customers that reduces access latency for direct cross-connects. The precinct’s industrial zoning history means large buildings with heavy structural loads are possible — important for the multi-ton weight of liquid-cooled GPU rack infrastructure.

The M4 facility is specifically designed for the infrastructure requirements of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPU architectures — Blackwell (B100/B200) and future Rubin Ultra — which demand liquid cooling loops at the rack level, high-voltage power delivery, and NVLink/InfiniBand networking at full bandwidth. Rack densities exceeding 100 kW are designed in from the building’s structural conception, not retrofitted.

A distinctive feature is the Mission Critical Operations Centre (MCX) — a sovereign security-classified hosting zone within the campus designed for Australian government and defense AI workloads. As Australia implements its AUKUS advanced technology commitments and Australian Defence Force AI programs expand, sovereign-controlled compute infrastructure for classified AI training and inference is a national priority. The MCX zone meets Australian government security framework (PSPF/ISM) requirements.

NEXTDC has also announced an AI Technology Centre of Excellence within M4, positioning the facility as a demonstration and testing ground for next-generation AI infrastructure architectures in partnership with NVIDIA, network vendors, and Australian AI research institutions.

Investment: A$2 billion · Capacity: 150-162 MW · GPU architectures: NVIDIA Blackwell, Rubin Ultra · Cooling: Liquid cooling (100+ kW per rack capable) · Sovereign zone: MCX mission-critical government hosting