Did NextDC buy land for a data centre in Geelong?

NextDC settled a A$165 million purchase of 169 hectares at Lovely Banks, north-west of Geelong, in June 2026, through a subsidiary called NEXTDC M5 Holdings Pty Ltd. The company has not announced a data centre build on the site. NextDC has previously listed an M5 Melbourne project as “under evaluation” in investor materials, and the site sits next to a high-voltage transmission line, both consistent with a future hyperscale facility, but no formal planning application has been lodged.

Where is the Lovely Banks site and why does the location matter?

Lovely Banks is about 13 kilometres north-west of the Geelong CBD, within the Northern Geelong Growth Area. The location matters because the parcel sits beside a high-voltage transmission line, which is what gives large data centres access to the stable, high-capacity power they require. The same corridor is masterplanned for more than 15,000 homes, so the land is attractive to both residential and data centre uses for the same infrastructure reasons.

Will the Geelong data centre replace planned housing?

It is not yet decided. The land was marketed in 2022 for up to 2,105 residential lots, and most of it sits in an urban growth area. The relevant precinct structure plan is not finalised, so the future land-use mix remains open. Planning experts note a data centre could either reduce housing capacity or, with buffers, sit alongside it. No planning application has been lodged, and the Victorian government says any future proposal will be assessed on its merits.

What is NextDC’s M5 project?

M5 is a Melbourne hyperscale project NextDC has listed as “under evaluation” in its investor materials. NextDC names its facilities sequentially by city, and its Melbourne sites currently run M1 to M4. The registration of NEXTDC M5 Holdings Pty Ltd as the buyer of the Lovely Banks land suggests the site could become a fifth Victorian facility, though NextDC has not confirmed a build, a capacity figure or a timeline.

NextDC banks A$165m of Geelong land at Lovely Banks

At a glance

A NextDC subsidiary, NEXTDC M5 Holdings Pty Ltd, settled the A$165 million purchase of 169 hectares at Lovely Banks, about 13 kilometres north-west of the Geelong CBD, in June 2026.
The site sits next to a high-voltage transmission line, the infrastructure that makes large-scale data centres viable, and inside a corridor masterplanned for more than 15,000 homes.
The land was marketed in 2022 as “Geelong Rise” for up to 2,105 residential lots, which is why the purchase carries a genuine land-use trade-off.
Victoria’s Development Facilitation Program lets the planning minister approve significant projects directly, without third-party VCAT appeal rights. No formal application has been lodged for the site.
Victoria already published a Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan in February 2026 that commits to using transport, energy and water data to choose data centre locations, the coordination tool this corridor will test.

Siting follows the grid

NextDC has settled the A$165 million purchase of 169 hectares at Lovely Banks, north-west of Geelong, through a subsidiary it registered in May 2026. The land takes in 155 Robbs Road and 675 to 775 Evans Road, was sold off-market through Colliers, and sits beside a high-voltage transmission line.

Large data centres are gated by access to stable, high-capacity power, so operators site them next to transmission lines. Lovely Banks drew a housing developer as serviced land on Geelong’s edge; it draws NextDC because the transmission line running past it can power a hyperscale load.

This is a pattern worth tracking across Australia. AEMO has now mapped 5.4GW of data centre demand seeking transmission connection, and is treating data centres as a standalone demand category in its 2026 Integrated System Plan. Where the grid can carry that load, siting decisions follow. Geelong’s northern growth area is one of those places.

A parcel once marketed for 2,105 homes

The Lovely Banks site was pitched to investors in 2022 as Geelong Rise, allowing for up to 2,105 residential lots subject to council approval. Most of the land sits within the urban growth area, and about half of 155 Robbs Road is currently zoned as farmland. This is not a brownfield industrial site or pure farmland being converted. It is land explicitly counted toward future housing supply.

That is what separates this purchase from NextDC’s earlier Victorian moves. The operator’s existing Melbourne campuses sit on industrial land. A move into a residential growth corridor puts a data centre footprint and a housing pipeline on the same map, which is a different planning question and a different community conversation.

The same grid-adjacent land draws homes and hyperscale

Lovely Banks is masterplanned for more than 15,000 homes across several neighbourhoods, part of the broader Northern and Western Geelong Growth Areas that are intended to house a six-figure future population. It is also exactly the kind of grid-adjacent, services-ready land that a hyperscale operator needs. Two long-run demands, residential growth on the edge of a major city and large-scale compute, are now drawing on the same scarce resource.

This collision is structural, and it will recur. Growth corridors are planned around infrastructure that data centres also depend on: transmission, water and road access. As Australia’s compute pipeline expands, the question of which grid-adjacent land carries homes, which carries data centres, and which carries both will land on more councils than Geelong’s.

M5 Holdings

NextDC labels its facilities by city and number, and its Melbourne sites run M1 to M4. The Lovely Banks land was bought by NEXTDC M5 Holdings Pty Ltd. NextDC has listed an M5 Melbourne project as “under evaluation” in its investor materials, so the purchase is consistent with, though not confirmation of, a fifth Victorian hyperscale site.

Facility	Status	Disclosed capacity	Location
M1	Operating (2012)	15MW	Melbourne
M2	Operating (2017)	60MW	Melbourne
M3	Operating (2022), Tier IV	150MW	Melbourne
M4	Fast-tracked 2026	150MW, A$2 billion	Port Melbourne (Fishermans Bend)
M5	Under evaluation	Not disclosed	Lovely Banks site acquired June 2026

Source: NEXTDC disclosures and Data Center Dynamics, June 2026.

M3 is the Tier IV campus that anchored Sharon AI’s 50MW supercluster lease, an indication of the scale Victorian demand is now reaching. M4, the A$2 billion Port Melbourne project, was fast-tracked by the Allan government earlier in 2026. NextDC has not announced an M5 build at the site.

The legitimate concerns sit with the process

The reaction to the settlement raises four substantive points.

The first is housing supply. A parcel counted toward 2,105 lots moving to another use during a housing shortage is a legitimate concern, and the Coalition’s planning spokesman David Southwick has tied it to long delays in approving Geelong’s growth-area structure plans.

The second is community voice. Most Victorian data centres are approved through the Development Facilitation Program, under which the planning minister decides directly and third-party appeal rights to VCAT are removed. That is a real trade-off between speed and local input. It is also the concern behind the Global Urban Data Centres Pact signed at London Climate Action Week on 23 June 2026 by 41 founding signatory cities including Melbourne, whose Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece said growth must be matched by responsible planning and genuine community involvement.

The third is environmental: water use, cultural heritage, and renewable energy targets. Greens MP for Western Victoria Sarah Mansfield called the purchase a “huge red flag” and has called for a halt on new AI data centres until communities are consulted and harms are addressed.

The fourth is the planning process itself. RMIT urban policy professor Jago Dodson noted the acquisition could be read two ways: as an attempt to influence the zoning of a precinct structure plan not yet approved, or as a proactive move to manage future impacts by creating a buffer between any data centre and residential areas. Both readings are open while the plan is unsettled.

What is already in place

Victoria already has a coordination framework for this question. In February 2026 the government released a Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan, backed by A$5.5 million and led by the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions, that commits to using transport, energy and water data to determine where new data centres are best located, and to managing water demand at a system level. That is the coordination framework a corridor like Lovely Banks is built to test.

The corridor’s mix is also still open. The relevant precinct structure planning is not finalised, with the Creamery Road plan tracking toward council adoption around September, and a spokeswoman for Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny confirmed the government has not received a formal planning application for the site. Grid-adjacent land is not lost to housing by default. With buffers, co-location and a structure plan that sequences both uses, a single corridor can carry homes and compute. The failure mode is planning housing and data centre siting through separate processes.

Victoria has shown it can hold both objectives at once when the planning is deliberate. AWS committed to cool its western Melbourne campus with recycled water in a Victorian first, and the state’s broader case that new demand can fund new supply sits behind why Australian power bills are falling on 1 July 2026. The corridor question is the same question applied to land.

What to watch

Three things will decide how this resolves. Whether the Creamery Road and broader Lovely Banks structure plans are finalised in a way that designates land for both housing and any data centre use. Whether NextDC lodges a Development Facilitation Program application for the site, and on what terms for community consultation. And whether the Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan’s siting-by-infrastructure-data commitment is applied to this corridor in practice. NextDC chief executive Craig Scroggie is scheduled to appear alongside Economic Growth Minister Steve Dimopoulos at a global data centre conference in Melbourne in September, by which point the structure plan should be clearer. For now, no application has been lodged.