NextDC's 169-hectare future hyperscale campus in Lovely Banks, Geelong, Victoria — acquired for AU$165 million in June 2026.
NextDC Lovely Banks Campus is a major future data centre development site located in Lovely Banks, Victoria, Australia, approximately 70 kilometres west of Melbourne and adjacent to the city of Geelong. In June 2026, Australian data centre operator NextDC acquired 169 hectares of farmland in the suburb for AU$165 million (approximately US$113.85 million), with the site chosen for its exceptional proximity to critical grid infrastructure, including a major electrical substation and the Victorian Big Battery — one of the largest battery energy storage systems in Australia. The acquisition signals NextDC's intention to develop a large-scale data centre campus capable of meeting growing demand for hyperscale and AI-driven compute capacity in the Victorian market.
The Lovely Banks site complements NextDC's existing Geelong Edge facility (GE1), a 4.4MW data centre that broke ground earlier in 2026 and is designed to serve regional connectivity and edge computing requirements. The Lovely Banks campus is expected to significantly exceed the GE1 in scale, with the site's 169 hectares providing ample land for a multi-building hyperscale development. The acquisition attracted considerable public attention, as the land had previously been earmarked for a residential development of approximately 2,000 homes, and the site's transition to a data centre campus has sparked debate around land use and digital infrastructure planning in regional Victoria.
NextDC operates or is developing 20 data centres across Australia, with flagship facilities in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, and Adelaide. Beyond Australia, the company has sites under planning or evaluation in Auckland, Tokyo, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Johor, and Singapore. The Lovely Banks campus represents one of NextDC's most ambitious Australian land acquisitions to date and is expected to play a central role in the company's long-term hyperscale and AI infrastructure strategy for the Asia-Pacific region.
