A $2 billion AI campus at Fishermans Bend will deliver liquid-cooled, high-density infrastructure to power Australia’s sovereign defence and compute capabilities.
The new development, dubbed M4 Melbourne, will be built on the former Westgate Park Printing Complex in Port Melbourne and span 50,000 square metres of mission-critical space.
The campus will offer up to 150MW of power capacity and is being engineered to support workloads tied to frontier AI, defence, and advanced manufacturing.
At its core is a liquid-cooled AI Factory, purpose-built for large-scale model training and inference. The facility will accommodate rack densities exceeding 1,000kW, with systems designed for compatibility with NVIDIA’s Blackwell and Rubin Ultra architectures.
Also planned is a Mission Critical Operations Centre, housed within Tier IV-certified infrastructure. This sovereign-grade control hub aims to provide a secure, fault-tolerant environment for digital operations with zero tolerance for downtime.
The site will include a Technology Centre of Excellence to support local talent development, with collaboration already in place between the developer, universities including RMIT and the University of Melbourne, and defence industry partners.
According to RMIT’s Distinguished Professor Calum Drummond, the initiative advances The Fisherman’s Bend Innovation Precinct as a future Technology Campus “for the development of key technologies needed to ensure Australian companies and knowledge-exchange institutions […] keep pace with the rapid innovations in AI.”
Infrastructure features will include integrated solar arrays and on-site microgrids, recycled wastewater cooling, waste heat recovery systems, and high-speed optical fabric connectivity.
The facility will be built to comply with PSPF, SCEC, HCF and DISP standards for secure government and defence operations.
The site is anchored within the broader Fishermans Bend Innovation Precinct, a government-backed advanced manufacturing and defence hub projected to support 30,000 jobs by 2051.
NEXTDC CEO Craig Scroggie described the facility as “critical infrastructure for Australia’s AI future,” stating, “AI factories are a new class of infrastructure, purpose-built for the industrial-scale production of tokens.”
