NEXTDC released its FY26 result after the close on 27 August 2026 and briefed analysts on 28 August. At the briefing it gave M5 a capacity figure for the first time. Chief executive Craig Scroggie called it “the recently acquired Melbourne M5 site” and put it at 1,200MW of IT load. In June 2026 the same project sat in the company’s investor materials as “under evaluation”.
For scale, NEXTDC has built 288MW across its entire portfolio and has 537MW under construction. M5 on its own is more than four times what is built, and larger than S4 Sydney at 365MW and S7 Eastern Creek at 650MW put together.
The investment into M5 will make Melbourne the largest region for NextDC with more than 1.7GW of capacity more than that available in Singapore.
On delivery, Scroggie said his expectation now is that NEXTDC can go from ground to a fully operating facility in about nine months, against 18 months he said it may historically have taken, on what he called “a manufacturing style of construction methodology”. He prefaced it by saying NEXTDC has not yet started a construction program on that basis, so it is an expectation about a model the company has not run rather than a demonstrated cycle time. The nine months applies to sites not yet started, so it bears on the 3GW in plan rather than the 537MW already under way.
Water use rose to 2.40 litres per kilowatt hour from 2.25 and power usage effectiveness went to 1.49 from 1.44. Both have now moved up three years running. Reuters reported NEXTDC put the increases down partly to newly commissioned capacity and partly to a data reconciliation exercise that turned up leaks and meter anomalies.
On location, Scroggie named nothing beyond Melbourne. The subsidiary that settled a A$165 million purchase of 169 hectares at Lovely Banks near Geelong in June 2026 is named NEXTDC M5 Holdings Pty Ltd. NEXTDC has not connected the two publicly and calls M5 a Melbourne site, while Lovely Banks is about 70km west, so the entity name is all that is on the record.
Still undisclosed: where M5 is, when it starts, how its power gets provisioned, whether there is an anchor tenant, and the size of any outside stake.
NextDC M5 is a major development regionally located (if you consider Geelong a regional centre) and is expected to be thew first of 3 major data. centre developments in the Geelong area one of Australia fastest growing regional areas. In addition Geelong is the home of Deakin University a first class source of technical resources post graduation.
Fibre Optical Cable Connections
The development of new hyperscale optical fibre networks connecting Geelong into a national optical network is already planned with Inligo Networks well underway on its deployment of the Unite Cable System and smaller build announced by SubCo and Victrack (a government owned optical fibre network that competes with commercial network operators) to upgrade a single connection between Geelong and Melbourne M3.
The Unite Cable System build connects Geelong directly to Melbourne and Ballarat creating a shorter optical path between Geelong directly to Adelaide and Darwin and Asia lowering latency between Melbourne/Geelong and Asia by as much as 10% calculations show.
