Exclusive Access 

Inside S3 Sydney: An Exclusive Look at the Data Centre Powering Australia's Digital Economy

NEXTDC CEO Craig Scroggie gives investing podcast Equity Mates rare, all-access entry to S3 Sydney, one of Australia's most advanced data centres. From AI infrastructure and seven layers of security to the systems behind hospitals, banks and emergency services. This is a look few ever get.

Inside the visit 

• See inside a $1 billion, 20,000 square metre data centre that is almost never open to cameras
• Understand the infrastructure running Australia's hospitals, banks, emergency services and AI workloads
• Learn how GPU clusters produce AI tokens at scale and what it means for the businesses using them
• Discover how NEXTDC keeps critical infrastructure online around the clock with zero tolerance for downtime
• Hear the CEO building Australia's AI infrastructure answer the question everyone is asking: is this a bubble? 

S3 Sydney sits 10 kilometres from the CBD. It cost $1 billion to build, spans 20,000 square metres and houses the servers underpinning some of Australia's most critical services. Almost no one gets inside.

In this video, NEXTDC CEO Craig Scroggie walks Equity Mates through the facility from end to end, covering the infrastructure, the technology and the commercial reality behind one of the largest data centre builds in Australian history.

Entry requires pre-approval, biometric fingerprint scanning and a security ID. Seven overlapping layers of physical security protect the facility, supported by more than a thousand cameras monitored around the clock by a dedicated security operations centre.

Latency matters. Whether it is online banking, stock trading or real-time surgical infrastructure, the distance between user and data centre is critical. S3 Sydney's location is a deliberate strategic decision, not a convenience.

The data hall is a concrete, fireproof, secure environment housing servers, power and cooling systems. Hot and cold aisles, painted red and blue, separate warm exhaust air from cool intake air, which is the most efficient form of thermal management at scale.

S3 Sydney hosts GPU clusters operated by NeoCloud providers including SharonAI, which produces AI tokens sold as a service. Every query processed by a large language model runs through infrastructure exactly like this. A single rack of NVIDIA chips can cost from half a million to over a million dollars.

The building draws from the grid but can operate entirely independently. Kinetic flywheels weighing up to eight tonnes maintain continuity during any grid interruption, backed by hundreds of thousands of litres of diesel for extended outages.

Heat is rejected through a chilled water system, predominantly using recycled water. Water is 3,000 to 3,500 times more thermally efficient at rejecting heat than air-based cooling. Future builds incorporate on-site water recycling and sewer mining capability.

Craig Scroggie addresses the question every investor and infrastructure leader is asking: is the AI build-out a bubble? Demand is outstripping supply. NEXTDC has sold more capacity in the last six months than in the prior decade. The constraint is not demand, it is the time required to build.

Watch the full video and see inside S3 Sydney for yourself.