The NEXTDC Ltd (ASX: NXT) share price is pushing higher on Thursday morning.
At the time of writing, the data centre operator's shares are up over 1% to $12.59.
Why is the NEXTDC share price rising?
The NEXTDC share price is rising today after the company achieved a major milestone in its long-term data centre development strategy.
According to the release, NEXTDC has secured a new data centre site in Western Sydney, named S4, for $124 million.
The release notes that S4 is a significant long-term expansion opportunity that will provide data centre services to hyperscale cloud providers in a new availability zone within the Sydney market not currently serviced by NEXTDC's existing data centres (S1, S2 and the under development S3 centre).
The company also revealed that S4 will allow Enterprise and Government customers to scale their critical infrastructure platforms in this important digital gateway region.
The 124,000sqm site is in Horsley Park, approximately 42 kilometres west of Sydney's central business district and close to a major electricity substation as well as telecommunications, utilities, and public infrastructure.
Subject to development approval, it is expected to accommodate a data centre facility capable of approximately 300MW of capacity, in addition to housing customers' mission critical operation centres, administrative offices, and collaboration spaces.
The S4 centre is expected to generate more than 500 new jobs during the development phase over several years.
NEXTDC's Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Craig Scroggie, said: "The demand for premium quality data centre assets in digital gateway regions such as Sydney continues to reflect the growth trajectory of technology infrastructure over the next decade. NEXTDC looks forward to being able to offer its customers dual availability zone solutions across its existing S1 and S2 Macquarie Park and S3 Gore Hill metropolitan data centres as well as this new S4 hyperscale campus in Western Sydney."
The NEXTDC share price is up 13% over the last 12 months.
