Data centre company NEXTDC is building a second Victorian base at Tullamarine to cater for increased demand for internet cloud services.
The ASX-listed business bought its site at 75 Sharps Road for $8.8 million in May, and will begin laying the foundations for a new $85 million data centre on its 3.8 hectare block next month.
NEXTDC provides off-site physical data centre facilities to clients, including servers, networking, meeting spaces and computing resources.
The new centre is one of three being built around Australia, with Sydney and Brisbane also in line for secondary sites, which when complete will add to the company’s suite of existing centres at Port Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney and Canberra.
NEXTDC chief operating officer Simon Cooper said the Tullamarine facility would be at least two to three times as big as its Port Melbourne data centre when it is ready to open its doors for business in June.
“About a year ago we realised that Port Melbourne was on a path to becoming full, so we invested in a second data centre,” Mr Cooper said. “We looked at a lot of sites, many out in the eastern suburbs, but a lot of those sites flood on a fairly frequent basis.
“This site is in an area between two airports, so it won’t be overflown, you’ve got great highways, a power network and it’s a good distance – 20 kilometres– from our other site,” Mr Cooper said.
There are a range of prerequisites a potential location must fulfill to suit a data centre, such as ensuring it is not flood-prone, has ample large-scale power, is not under a flight path, and it must have access to fibre networks.
Mr Cooper said the centre would be one of power company Jemena’s largest customers, “perhaps second only to Melbourne Airport”.
NEXTDC is the second data company to open a centre in Brimbank this year. In March, global tech company Digital Realty bought land in Deer Park to build an $88.8 million data centre opposite their existing facility in Radnor Drive.
