NEXTDC Brand Guidelines: A 2010 Brisbane Listing, Numbered Sites & KL1 Kuala Lumpur

A founder, two properties and a December listing.

NEXTDC was founded in May 2010 by the technology entrepreneur Bevan Slattery, the company’s own history page says, to build and operate carrier- and vendor-neutral data centres in Australia and New Zealand. It listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 2010, after buying properties in Brisbane and Melbourne, according to the company. English Wikipedia, in a revision of October 2026, gives the same founding month and listing date and places the company’s headquarters in Brisbane, Queensland.

The name is set in capitals by the company itself — NEXTDC — while Wikipedia and much of the Australian technology press, including iTnews, write it as NextDC. The company’s releases use the full form NEXTDC Limited and its ASX code, NXT.

Its first facilities came online in quick succession. The company dates B1 Brisbane to October 2011, M1 Melbourne to July 2012 and C1 Canberra to August 2012. iTnews reported on 30 August 2012 that C1, a 6,000-square-metre former government data centre in the north-west of the Australian Capital Territory, had officially opened as the company’s third facility, after B1 and M1, and that the first non-carrier customers had moved in at the end of July. S1 in Sydney followed in September 2013 and P1 in Perth in February 2014, the company says. In January 2013, its history adds, NEXTDC completed the sale of the M1, S1 and P1 property assets to APDC.

Leadership changed early. In June 2012 Craig Scroggie became chief executive and Slattery became non-executive deputy chairman, the company says, and Slattery retired from the board in September 2013. Scroggie was still chief executive and managing director in May 2026, when the company’s release on its Kuala Lumpur launch quoted him in that role.

Numbered sites, from B1 to S7.

NEXTDC names each building by city and number — B1 and B2 in Brisbane, M1 to M4 in Melbourne, S1 to S7 in Sydney, P1 and P2 in Perth — according to the site list on its website. The pattern has carried through every expansion. iTnews reported on 19 May 2016 that the company had bought land in the Melbourne suburb of Tullamarine for M2, aimed eventually at a 25 MW IT load with an initial 2 MW, and had picked Fortitude Valley for a second Brisbane site. The company dates the opening of B2 to September 2017 and of M2 to November 2017, and says both were certified to the Uptime Institute’s Tier IV standard.

Larger campuses followed. NEXTDC says it bought land in July 2021 for a planned 300 MW hyperscale campus in Western Sydney, and that it opened the first stage of S3 Sydney at Artarmon, which it describes as an 80 MW campus, in September 2022, and of M3 Melbourne at West Footscray, described as 150 MW, in October 2022. In March 2024 it bought a data-centre shell in Artarmon that it renamed S6.

It also built smaller regional sites that it calls edge data centres: SC1 on the Sunshine Coast in December 2021, PH1 at Port Hedland in the Pilbara in August 2023, NE1 at Newman in July 2024, D1 in Darwin in August 2024 and A1 in Adelaide in September 2024, according to its history. In October 2024 it announced the acquisition of the S7 site in Sydney, which it said would target 550 MW.

Alongside floor space, the company sells connections. It announced its AXON interconnection platform in July 2015 and made its ONEDC customer portal generally available in March 2016, and its website lists direct links to cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. Its history records a series of Frost & Sullivan awards between 2018 and 2024, including Australian Data Centre Services Company of the Year in 2021 and 2022.

Data halls and campuses.

Data-centre operators sell something most of their customers will rarely see in person. The product is space, power, cooling and connections inside buildings that are secure by design, so the industry has built a recognisable visual language to stand in for the real thing. Long white halls lined with rows of server racks, often lit in a cool blue, are the most common image on websites, in reports and on trade-show stands.

The second stock image is the campus from the air. Aerial photographs show low, windowless buildings set out in a grid, with car parks, substations and fenced yards around them. Close-ups fill in the detail: banks of cooling towers or chillers on a roof, rows of backup generators, cable trays crowded with fibre and power cords, and engineers in hi-vis vests checking a tablet between the racks. The pictures are meant to suggest scale, order and control rather than any single product.

Names and marks tend to follow the same logic. Many operators use short coined names, initials or plain descriptive words, set in clean sans-serif type, and organise their sites with city or airport codes and numbers. Colour schemes lean on blues, greys and one sharper accent, and campaigns talk about capacity, connectivity and growth in measured, technical language. Because the buildings look alike, the difference is often carried by naming, maps of locations and the way a company describes its customers.

Much of this identity is presented in person at industry gatherings such as Datacloud Global Congress and PTC, where operators, investors and network companies meet. Stands, keynote slides and printed site maps there tend to repeat the same visual cues as the websites: hall photography, campus renders and lists of markets. The guides in this group look at how individual operators use those shared conventions.

Kuala Lumpur first, then Eastern Creek.

NEXTDC’s first move abroad was to Malaysia. The company announced plans for KL1 Kuala Lumpur in June 2023 and, in a release dated 14 May 2026, said KL1, in the Klang Valley, had gone live as its first international data centre, designed for 65 MW of IT capacity and built to Tier IV design principles. English Wikipedia, in its October 2026 revision, counts 17 data centres in Australia and one in Malaysia as of March 2026. The company’s website lists AK1 in New Zealand as in development and TK1 in Japan as in planning; its history says site clearing for TK1 Tokyo began in September 2024.

The S7 site in western Sydney has since drawn a partner. On 5 December 2025 NEXTDC signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI to plan, develop and operate a hyperscale AI campus and GPU supercluster at its S7 site in Eastern Creek, TechInformed reported that day. The report described the agreement as nonbinding, gave the site’s planned potential capacity as 550 MW, and said the first phase was expected in the second half of 2027, subject to approvals. TelecomTV reported that NEXTDC was the first local partner in OpenAI for Australia, which it described as OpenAI’s first “OpenAI for Countries” programme in the Asia-Pacific region.

The company remains listed on the ASX, where its releases give the code NXT, and its site list now runs under the same lettered system from Port Hedland and Newman in Western Australia to Kuala Lumpur.

For a design guide, NEXTDC shows how a capitalised name and a plain numbering of sites can carry an operator across a continent. Compare AirTrunk, another Australian data-centre operator, and Equinix. For this guide we use a night navy, a bright signal blue and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NEXTDC’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.