Publicly traded data centre operator NEXTDC Limited (ASX: NXT) has acquired a site in Western Sydney for AU$124 million (US$91.69 million) where it plans to establish the business’ fourth facility in the Australian city.

The provider said S4 Sydney will play a “critical role” in enabling enterprise and government customers to scale their critical infrastructure platforms in this important digital gateway region.

Located in Horsley Park, S4 will be 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.

The site covers approximately 124,000sqm and subject to development approval, it is expected to accommodate a data centre facility that will target 300MW of capacity, in addition to housing customers’ mission-critical operation centres, mission-critical operations offices and collaboration spaces.

During the development phase of S4, over several years NEXTDC is expected to generate more than 500 new jobs for the NSW economy, the company said in a statement.

NEXTDC chief executive officer and managing director, Craig Scroggie, added: “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 our customers dual availability zone solutions across our existing S1 and S2 Macquarie Park and S3 Gore Hill metropolitan data centres as well as this new S4 hyperscale campus in Western Sydney.”

Over in Melbourne, as Google brought online its latest cloud region, NEXTDC has also announced the availability of zero latency data exchanges to Google Cloud from its M2 Melbourne data centre.

Scroggie said: “Google’s new Melbourne cloud region, and this enhanced level of local, native access to Google Cloud that we are able to offer gives our customers the major advantage of speed and as little as zero latency.

This will enable businesses to maximise the value, and performance they drive from their Hybrid/Multi-Cloud environments.”