NEXTDC Plans $7bn AI Campus at Western Sydney Site

NEXTDC plans to develop a next-generation hyperscale AI campus and large-scale GPU supercluster at its S7 site in Western Sydney following a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI.

The data centre operator picked up the Eastern Creek site in 2024 for around $353 million.

NEXTDC said the site could accommodate a facility with capacity of around 550 megawatts, which would make it more powerful than CDC’s recently approved 504-megawatt facility planned as the largest in the southern hemisphere.

OpenAI will be the initial anchor tenant with options to scale over time under the OpenAI for Countries program.

The infrastructure would also be available to other companies and organisations requiring sovereign compute capacity for sensitive and mission-critical workloads.

NEXTDC chief executive Craig Scroggie said billions in investment would go towards a “world leading piece of sustainable digital infrastructure that will demonstrate that Australia can be a leader in digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence”.

Subject to approval, the first phase of the S7 project is expected to be delivered in the second half of 2027.

The campus is engineered as a sovereign AI facility that would keep data and computer operations within Australia’s jurisdiction, under Australian control and subject to Australian laws and security frameworks.

The site would incorporate closed-loop high-density liquid cooling for ultra-high-density GPU clusters, which will not require ongoing potable drinking water for cooling operations.

Power for the facility would come from long-term power purchase agreements for new renewable energy sources including wind, solar and batteries.

The project is expected to deliver thousands of direct and indirect jobs during construction, as well as ongoing technical, manufacturing, engineering and operational roles.

The announcement coincided with the launch of OpenAI for Australia, the company’s first such initiative in the Asia-Pacific region and followed the release of the Federal Government’s National AI Plan.

▲ NEXTDC’s hyper-scale Darwin facility is expected to complete later this year.

NEXTDC operates or is developing 20 data centres across Australia including facilities in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Port Hedland, Canberra, Adelaide, the Sunshine Coast and Darwin.

The company has six Sydney data centres in operation or development totalling just under 500 megawatts and 178,500sq m, including S3 and S6 in Artarmon, three facilities in Macquarie Park and S4 in Horsley Park.

The $1-billion S3 facility in Artarmon (pictured top) opened in August 2022 with construction completed in June 2023, delivering 80 megawatts of capacity across 26,000sq m and achieving Uptime Institute Tier IV certification as Sydney’s largest fault-tolerant data centre.

Sydney’s aggregate data centre supply surpassed 5.2 gigawatts in the first half of 2025, with total live IT capacity reaching 757 megawatts, according to Knight Frank.

Operators continue to scale investment in the city despite rising costs and land and power constraints.

Melbourne’s total data centre supply nearly tripled to 4.7 gigawatts in the second quarter of 2025 as land and power limitations drive development south from Sydney, according to Knight Frank.

The Victorian capital now hosts dedicated cloud regions from AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, with 95 per cent of co-location take-up driven by artificial intelligence workloads.

NEXTDC is forging ahead on the $2-billion M4 digital campus at Fishermans Bend at 127 Todd Road, Port Melbourne, which has received Victorian Government backing.

Plans for the Melbourne project were filed in January, 15 months after the company completed its M3 facility at West Footscray, following M1 at Port Melbourne and M2 at Tullamarine.