West Footscray data centre bids to double in size amid ‘nightmare’ construction

One of Melbourne’s largest “hyperscale” data centres will double in size to cover a 10-hectare parcel of land in West Footscray if plans before the state government are approved.

NextDC, an ASX-listed data centre builder, has applied to the Allan government’s fast-track planning program to expand its centre on Indwe Street, West Footscray, which it began building in 2021.

The data centre – which is already operational and one of the city’s biggest – is eight kilometres from the city centre and immediately across the street from scores of homes.

Though it is expanding inside an industrial zone, the site has drawn strong opposition from locals.

Homes along the data centre’s northern boundary are 15 metres away from the property, and a handful of residences are less than 40 metres from large water towers attached to the side of the facility.

The first stages of the data centre, which replaced several factories and warehouses on the site, opened in 2022. NextDC says 41,000 square metres of technical space is now available.

Resident Jacqui Glover, who has lived in West Footscray for more than a decade, said the expansion plans needed to be reined in for the good of residents living alongside the project.

“It’s just expanded, expanded, expanded. Now it’s just getting out of control,” she said. “It feels like we’re never ever going to be getting out of this nightmare that we live in.”

The application is being processed under the Allan government’s Development Facilitation Program, a scheme designed to bypass traditional planning delays for “priority” projects.

Construction costs for the expansion, which will cover close to 5½ hectares, are expected to exceed $750 million. The project is expected to be completed in late 2027, with total spending on construction across the site’s various stages reaching about $1 billion.

The planning application for the project says that once operational and running at full capacity, the centre is expected to deliver 100 jobs – 65 of which will be located onsite.

The community consultation period for the project ends on March 28.

Although West Footscray was already an industrial area when Glover moved in, she said the reality of living next to a data centre of this scale was grim, particularly because of the constant hum of the air-cooling units and the layers of dust from construction now permanently coating her house.

“I just can’t understand how this is allowed to happen, how this is allowed to even be put forward,” she said. The plan to expand the data centre beyond its already enormous footprint was “all about money. Stop making it all about these businesses,” she said.

A NextDC spokeswoman said the company had no comment on the plans beyond the application that was before the government.

NextDC operates three data centres across the city – in Port Melbourne, Tullamarine and the first phase of the West Footscray site. A fourth centre in Port Melbourne to cost almost $1 billion was green-lit by the state government in February after just 75 days.

Victoria is desperate for more data centres to be built, in part because of the construction jobs it will create. Last year, Premier Jacinta Allan promised to be “ruthless” about attracting data centres to the state.

Along with AirTrunk, Amazon Web Services, CDC and Microsoft, NextDC is part of a small group of technology companies that control the data centre industry in Australia. The country has rapidly become Asia-Pacific’s third-largest data centre market, behind China and India.

Data Centres Australia, which represents a coalition of heavyweight industry operators, has spearheaded the sector’s campaign to reshape energy and planning laws concerning data centres.

“Our members say they have seen more demand for data hall space in the past 12 months than in the past 10 years,” the group’s chief executive, Belinda Dennett, said on Tuesday.

Dennett said the push for “hyperscale” facilities such as those in West Footscray was largely driven by Australia’s rapid uptake of digital services and AI.

“Data centres are not built on speculation – the growth is driven by demand, and that demand is not slowing,” she said, noting Australia now ranked fourth globally in the business use of Anthropic’s Claude AI.

To handle this digital surge, Dennett argued, hyperscale centres and purpose-built co-location data centres were the most sustainable path forward because they were 67 per cent more energy-efficient than companies keeping private computer servers on their own premises.

A spokeswoman for Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny did not directly respond to questions about the potential environmental or community impacts of the expansion.

She said the application would be carefully assessed by the relevant agencies and stakeholders, and that because the proposal was under consideration, “it would be inappropriate to comment further”.

A Maribyrnong Council spokeswoman said the municipality would make a submission to the state government regarding the application.

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