Raising capital and NEXTDC’s plans for the future 

Listed@ASX: What’s your advice for other businesses raising capital in this market? 

Craig Scroggie (CS): It's crucial to maintain clear communication with investors because they want a thorough understanding of the business to make informed decisions about supporting capital requests. Transparent and effective communication ensures investors are well-informed about risks and potential rewards, fostering trust and facilitating stronger business relationships. This transparency helps secure necessary funding and aligns investor expectations with company goals. 

Listed@ASX: When you have been going to market to raise capital, either from existing or new investors, how have you found the spread and depth of investors both in Australia and offshore?  How well do they understand your business and growth strategy? 

CS: We actively engage with investors to foster a comprehensive understanding of our business. This includes regular communication with institutional investors, participation in investor conferences and conducting tours of NEXTDC facilities across the country. Additionally, we maintain connections with a wide range of equity analysts who provide objective assessments of NEXTDC, ensuring investors have access to diverse viewpoints. 

While it is more straightforward to interact with domestic investors through in-person meetings and on-site facility tours, we also ensure that our offshore investors are equally well-informed and engaged. These efforts have been instrumental in maintaining their support, especially during equity-raising events. This dual approach helps to sustain investor confidence and supports our ongoing growth initiatives. 

Should this occur, it would be a response to further increases in customer demand, reflecting a very positive catalyst of growth and expansion. Such a scenario, while requiring additional resources, would represent a high-quality problem, indicating strong market demand and the company's continued success in the industry. 

This balanced approach to capital management ensures that NEXTDC is prepared to scale operations while maintaining financial health, and maintain disciplined capital investment aligned with customer demand, that is ultimately supporting sustained growth and shareholder value creation. 

This consistency aids in transparency and builds investor confidence, as they know exactly where to find important information in our reporting documents and can reliably compare current data with historical performance. This strategy supports informed investment decisions and underscores our commitment to transparency and accountability in our financial communication. 

The AI revolution and managing increasing demand  

Listed@ASX: How is the global AI revolution impacting NEXTDC’s growth strategy and how are you positioned to benefit? 

CS: The AI revolution is the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution. It is significantly shaping the data centre industry, particularly in environments where AI workloads are managed, whether for training or inference purposes. Although the full impact of AI on the Australian market is still unfolding, the trends observed globally, specifically in the US, combined with our active engagements with global customers, suggest a massive increase in demand for data centre services driven by AI applications. 

At NEXTDC, we are uniquely positioned as Australia's leading data centre as a service operator to accommodate substantial AI workloads and to introduce the new liquid cooling technologies required to support them. Based on current trends and customer feedback, we anticipate AI will have a substantial and positive impact on the demand for data centre capacity in Australia and Asia Pacific. This outlook reflects our commitment to supporting the dynamic needs of our customers as they harness the potential of AI, ensuring NEXTDC remains at the forefront of the digital infrastructure industry. 

In addition to handling these expanding demands, there is an increasing focus on sustainability and minimising environmental impacts, renewable energy, zero waste, carbon neutrality to name a few. This trend aligns perfectly with NEXTDC's operational philosophy, as we operate the most energy-efficient, NABERS-certified, independently audited data centres in the country. Our commitment to sustainability drives customer expectations, reinforcing our position in the market. 

Moreover, the concept of AI factories, where data centres are tailored specifically to handle large-scale AI operations, is becoming a significant aspect of our strategic planning. These AI factories are designed to support extensive machine learning and AI data processing workloads, which require significant higher-power density management and liquid cooling systems to function optimally. 

NEXTDC's advanced infrastructure is ideally suited to support these high-demand environments, making us a preferred provider for enterprises looking to leverage AI capabilities. We have been designing and deploying advanced liquid cooling solutions for many years. This alignment with technological advancement and sustainability uniquely positions NEXTDC to capitalise on current and future market trends. 

This transparency also enhances investor trust and confidence, which is critical for attracting a diverse range of global investors. The liquidity of NEXTDC’s shares on ASX allows a broad spectrum of institutional investors to engage with our company. This is the most exciting time in the history of technology and the public position’s gives investors the opportunity to continue to gain exposure to the fast growth and dynamic cloud computing and AI revolution. 

Our public listing fosters greater corporate transparency and enhances our capability to support continuous growth and navigate financial landscapes effectively, benefiting all stakeholders involved.