Victoria’s Government has approved a massive data centre in the parklands adjacent to the West Gate Bridge without fully considering the risks. Megan Jones with the story.
London data centres are hosing down their cooling systems to prevent fire. In Melbourne, the State government has approved a super-sized data centre on the edge of the West Gate Bridge’s eastern approach ramp, directly between the freeway and Westgate Park, a bushfire-prone native reserve.
The Victorian Government, using the emergency planning powers of the Development Facilitation Program (DFP), took 75 days to permit the building of NEXT DC, a $2B, 162 MW hyperscale data centre, with a stored onsite backup fuel load of 900 tonnes of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries and 3.5 million litres of diesel.
Dubbed M4, the development, on behalf of Nvidia, is being built on the old News Ltd site across 2.64 hectares on 127 Todd Road, at the convergence of the West Gate Bridge, the Port of Melbourne shipping lane, and the West Gate transport corridor — all tier-one infrastructure.
Firefighter warnings
Kristjan Tuul, a firefighter with 20 years’ experience, now with the United Firefighters Union, said there are currently no adequate planning measures, equipment or resources in place to prepare firefighters for a thermal runaway event at the proposed data centre.
Tuul said a fully involved fire at a site of this scale could require a coordinated statewide response involving firefighters, airport emergency services and potentially Defence personnel, and could take weeks or more than a month to bring under control, telling MWM:
The consequences could be catastrophic for the surrounding community, the environment and the economy.
Tuul said firefighters had not been adequately consulted about emergency preparedness, mitigation measures or the resources that would be required should a major incident occur.
The development borders Westgate Park, which was the site of a major bushfire in December 2024 and another fire in 2025.
No fire danger assessment made
Tuul’s concern does not appear to extend to the political level. Nina Taylor, the local Member for Albert Park and recently appointed Cabinet Secretary, confirmed by email that she had not spoken with Fire Rescue Victoria about the potential fire and explosion risks associated with the development. Fires at data centres are rare, but they do happen.
A fire at South Korea’s National Information Resources Service data centre in Daejeon on September 26, 2025, triggered a thermal runaway event during a routine maintenance procedure. It took around 200 firefighters about 200 hours to bring the incident under control.
Fires have also occurred at data centres in Hillsboro, Oregon; Lincoln, Nebraska; Ain, France; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Ogden City, Utah; and Strasbourg, France. As no public global register of accidents or incidents exists, near misses and fires often go unreported.
All these fires were contained within the Data Centre Precinct, with no thermal runaways extending beyond the precinct. In Melbourne, the West Gate off-ramp is within the data centre’s precinct, which also borders the Port of Melbourne shipping lane.
Tuul warned large volumes of contaminated firefighting water and toxic runoff could also have significant consequences for surrounding infrastructure, including the Port of Melbourne, particularly if emergency services were unable to contain the runoff.
NEXT DC
NEXT DC is the operator of the new data centre. In a media release, CEO Craig Scroggie said M4 would have direct-to-chip closed-loop cooling supporting rack densities of 1000kW using recycled non-potable water. M4 has all the top-tier global safety certificates, including the prestigious Tier 111 and Tier IV certifications from the Uptime Institute, which sets the global standard for evaluating data centre reliability, availability and performance.
NEXT DC did not return calls for comments on the fire risk.
Ironically, the elaborate cooling systems used to cool the computers in data centres can cause fires. “As the climate warms and facilities attempt to minimise cooling for efficiency reasons, we could see a trend for cooling system failures,” wrote Peter Judge in Data Centre Dynamics magazine.
Judge is now a senior research analyst with the Uptime Institute. He told MWM he still stood by these quotes, reporting that a cooling system caused a fire in China in October 2022.
A backup cooling tower caught fire in the block that houses the data centre at China’s Suzhou Supercomputing Centre in the Suzhou Industrial Park, a technology and business flagship for the country. Cooling failures are rare, but experts warned that similar incidents are increasingly likely.
Rising temperatures might mean many data centres aren’t well suited to their local weather and could be vulnerable to future cooling failures.
Long-term risk
For Kristjan Tuul, the question is not simply how the West Gate data centre is managed today, while the facility is new and under intense scrutiny, but what happens over the decades ahead.
History shows why long-term oversight matters, as data centres have a 30-year lifespan.
In August 1991, chemical storage facilities at Coode Island caught fire, forcing evacuations and raising major concerns about industrial hazards near Melbourne’s population and critical infrastructure. The subsequent Coode Island inquiry identified four hundred breaches of safety requirements.
High power densities, battery and power supply failures, thermal mismanagement, and human error have caused other fires.
All causes were electrical, and the most common cause was lithium-ion battery failure, which led to three of the eight fires mentioned. The threat of overheating lithium-ion batteries increases with their higher energy density.
In London during a major heatwave in 2022, and probably more recently, data centres were forced to hose down their cooling systems due to overheating.
In further research, Peter Judge, while Editor at Data Centre magazine, warned in screaming headlines:
Ignore Li-ion fire risks at your peril.
Has the Victorian State Government done just that?
Megan Jones is a long-time resident of Port Melbourne and a former journalist, having published in the Daily Mirror (London), The Observer (London), The Herald (Melbourne), The Sunday Herald, and The Age.