Podcast | Ep 92 | Data centres: NEXTDC on making projects happen

20 October 202615 minSeason 8

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Courtney Lock: Hello, I’m Courtney Lock, and welcome to Engineering Reimagined, recorded live at Data Centre World Asia in Singapore.

The data centre industry is changing fast. Just eight years ago, facilities were designed with around 20 megawatts of capacity. Today, projects can be hundreds of megawatts, with gigawatt-scale campuses on the horizon.

So, exactly what does rapid growth mean for how data centres are designed and delivered, and the talent and skills needed to make projects happen?

In this episode, Simon McFadden, Aurecon's Industry Director for Digital Infrastructure, speaks with Jeff Van Zetten, Chief of Engineering and Design at NEXTDC.

Let’s get into it.

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Simon McFadden: Hi everybody, I'm Simon McFadden, Aurecon's Industry Director for Digital Infrastructure. And today I'm joined by Jeff Van Zetten, Chief of Engineering and Design at NEXTDC. Welcome Jeff.

Jeff Van Zetten: Thanks, good to be here.

Simon McFadden: Thanks for joining us. I was reflecting before this Jeff and I was thinking to myself, we met about eight years ago up in Brisbane. And if I think back to that time, we were designing data centres that were about 20 megawatts in capacity, and now routinely projects are hundreds of megawatts and often they're gigawatt campuses being talked about. If you think about that period and the scale, that's like a 50 times increase. How is your supply chain and your delivery model, how has that evolved over that time?

Jeff Van Zetten: What has been interesting is that it has grown organically and our business has grown with the market. Starting with two megawatts, then to 12 to 15, then to 30, then to 80. So for us, it has been, although pretty significant, the percentage has actually been consistently large, so it's always been a challenge. I think keeping consistent teams is very important, though, that's at the heart of it. The principles are the same. The fundamentals of engineering and physics don't change. So if you can apply to design a two megawatt and understand that properly, though the scales have changed and you have to improve efficiencies, you can take that knowledge through as you scale up and up and up. I think that people is the biggest challenge now. I think supply chain is grown. Bringing in more engineers and architects at the speed we need is the challenge.

Simon McFadden: As part of that, you have a very large portfolio now, how do you think about standardising across that portfolio?

Jeff Van Zetten: Look it's essential. It's a very different world now and I'd say that's the biggest change that's happened with NEXTDC. A lot of what we've done in the past, as you know, would have been what we call urban metro co-location and now doing multiple facilities in the hundreds and gigawatts. It is going to be liberating, quite frankly, and we're very well progressed with that and it's actually going to make, despite the scale, in many ways life will be easier because it forces standardisation and things that we've wanted to do are now genuinely happening.

Simon McFadden: Through that journey right, you've been at NEXTDC a long time. And you've seen, NEXTDC is a great example of an Australian success story. Started in Australia and Brisbane, listed on the ASX, and has grown right through Australia and expanded out. Now and you're operating in a number of countries around the Asia Pacific. How has that journey been for you?

Jeff Van Zetten: I’ve really loved it. Look, you can't want to be bored in this industry and this is a great place to be if you don't like to be bored. I'm just extremely excited and happy that we've got KL1 is live and open and set a new standard to year four. Green Mark Platinum, GBI Platinum building in Tokyo, it's incredibly satisfying. It's awesome. Like really to take an Australian company from a startup and to be a part of that journey, I just feel blessed and lucky. This is part of my life story. It's awesome, it's a lot of fun.

Simon McFadden: That's cool. You were operating in Australia and you'd lived in Asia before, right, but have you noticed anything about expanding into Asia with your business that you've learned through that process that you brought back to the business in Australia that has evolved how you operate?

Jeff Van Zetten: Definitely some on the supply chain, just broadening your horizons into Asia has been really enlightening. Opens up new avenues and different suppliers, which maybe didn't have such a presence in Australia, can have a better supply. It's all about the local people. So it's opened up our supply chain with companies I've wanted to. And then, countries like Japan, such a different way of doing things, technology's up there again, quite a unique market. And there's things that we're doing in Japan that you go, wow, this is going to help us in Australia, and it is literally right now. So yeah, definitely opens your mind. Diversity is the key. Learn new things, apply them.

Simon McFadden: One of the things that I'm conscious of at the moment is that the data centre industry appears in the media pretty much every day now. And we go back a few years and there wasn't really any commentary about data centres. How do you think about the conversation with people that are concerned about data centres or AI?

Jeff Van Zetten: I think about this a lot. I’ve put my life's work in to it, researching how to be energy efficient and reduce carbon. I think about my kids all the time. Literally, we're at the heart of it. There's a transition happening now and a journey we have to take people on. There are a lot of unfortunately unfounded fears and there are some legitimate concerns and issues. So firstly, you just got to make sure you comply. Do the right things and if there's legitimate concerns you just have to accept them and address. There's a lot of we grew up with Terminator and things like that so there's a lot deeper psychological issues which are at the heart of a lot of this we're going to have to work our way through. I do see this and a lot like the Millennium Bug was going to take out the world. I'm not sure if many of you lived through that one, but all the planes were going to fall out of the sky and it was all going to be doom and gloom and a lot of people put good work into it and sure enough, year 2000 came around and everything kept going. This is new technology, as engineers, we will always have to understand those risks, deal with them and manage them. It's our responsibility, particularly in the engineering side to deal with those and manage them appropriately for the human race. One thing I would say as I've just asked more people to get involved and help solve the problems and not throw rocks on the outside. You can be either someone that complains about the world and doesn't understand it, or take part, get involved, become engineers and architects and create the future and address those concerns you have.

Simon McFadden: So on that, there are concerns around AI and technology, but there's a whole bunch of opportunities as well, and one of the things we've noticed, say, in our business is that we're rolling out Copilot across our 7,000 staff, and also another tool called Nomic that enables large language models to interact with drawings. And we're excited about that. We've had a trial, and it's positive, and it is enabling people. When you think about the positive side of the use of AI, have you got any examples of that? Have you seen that through your work?

Jeff Van Zetten: It's like putting a turbo charger on every person. Right? It is phenomenal. It really can save you the mundane. The time you could spend just going through data and files or formatting all this, it just helps you be so efficient so people can focus on the more fun stuff. So honestly, I wouldn't do this if I didn't believe in it. And if I didn't genuinely believe, it's going to help us as a human race solve a lot of problems. We're just going through the very early stages where there's a lot of misunderstanding and people are still working out how to use it. But it's quite phenomenal how it can improve efficiency for everybody.

Simon McFadden: I'm finding that it's really powerful, as you said, to remove the administrative part of thinking. So when you need to analyse things or you need to develop a way to communicate something, it takes that out and then allows us to focus on the thinking. So, you mentioned there about getting facts out through media and through social media. I saw a post on LinkedIn recently where one of the team at AWS had posted that they were the largest corporate buyer of carbon-free energy in Australia in 2025. I thought, that's pretty different to the narrative. And if you think about the sensible policy choices in Australia, it aligns actually with that. Do you think there's a way that we can get better facts out there? Is there something that you think in your business that you do?

Jeff Van Zetten: It's something we are consciously working towards. I'll give an example. A big initiative that we've done with Aurecon's help. We'll have probably Australia's largest water recycling plant to help save energy and carbon in Sydney. It was an underutilised taking the sewer and shower water of much of that part of Sydney, a plant that had been built and was not being used and we're going to use that to , cut the peak power and carbon of a data centre by you know 10% or more. It's a phenomenally good story where you're taking wastewater would go into the ocean, and we're using it to cool data centres. And I think you're gonna find a lot of investment will go into that market and that message in the coming months and years. There's a data centre we've got. Again, it will have one of the most energy-efficient data centres in Australia, if not the Southern Hemisphere, down in Melbourne. The PUEs will be probably sub 1.1, actually. Which is phenomenal efficiency, but there's trade-offs and we've got to explain the trade-offs of that. And we've also got to help utilities be a part of this as well.

Simon McFadden: Changing tack a little, I'm talking about leadership in a time of, if you think about what's going on, there's a lot of pressure and stress and pace in this industry, there is a whole load of recruitment happening, like people are getting offers left, right and centre, or being approached probably more accurately left, right and centre. How do you lead your team through this, when you're thinking about all the change and so on?

Jeff Van Zetten: I value the people above all else, which is a change for me as an engineer. Ten years ago, it was all about the technical. But I think number one, genuinely valuing people. And then really supporting them and backing them and giving them a lot of love. You've got to help their careers too, like the market's the market and you've got to meet the market. I think a lot of the world has unfortunately moved too much towards a disposable culture of everything and people. And it's actually missed by most people is longevity and stability and long-term friendships and careers. So it's a bit old school, but honestly, people tend to be happier with stability and deep friendships and colleagues they get along with. I think trying to build a good team with like-minded people and then hold them dearly and protect them like your family.

Simon McFadden: And if we think about it, here we are, we're at Tech Week in Singapore. Have you seen anything over the last couple of days that you went, oh, that's new or I'm excited about that?

Jeff Van Zetten: I'm happy to see the 800 volt starting to get traction and I got to see my first medium voltage solid-state transformer in real life a few months ago, it was kind of fun. I've got to say the discussion is now starting to go to two-phase onto the chips as an engineer. I saw it years ago with the Cray supercomputers and it made a lot of sense to me back then. I don't know if it will happen or won't happen. So I'm gonna say, that's probably the technology that I'm curious if it will land or not.

Simon McFadden: Yeah and managing all the liquid in the data centre on top of that.

Jeff Van Zetten: Getting the refrigerants in there and heat pipes are amazing things. They're just miracles of physics. So we'll see if that happens.

Simon McFadden: That's true, true mechanical engineering, Jeff. And we think about the future, I know that's very hard to do, but if we jump five years ahead and we think about is there anything you think that will be fundamentally different about how we design and build data centres?

Jeff Van Zetten: I spend a lot of time in the future in my brain trying to work out where we're gonna go. I just hope that when we get to that point, we've really delivered some real value for the human race with all we've done. And by then you'd hope that there have been some phenomenal discoveries in research and development and efficiencies which can really solve the problems. So you'd think that with this investment and this intellectual capacity going into it that the tools that we're building are going to really solve issues at a significant scale by 2030. It's exciting not to know what it's going to be, I guess.

Simon McFadden: That's true. That's probably a great note to end on, Jeff, and I might ask you, have you any questions for me?

Jeff Van Zetten: How do we attract more young people into our area?

Simon McFadden: I think as an industry, we're starting to do this, we are starting to make young people aware of the industry. But I don't think we're doing a great job of that yet. I think we can do much better across the trades and across universities in saying, hey, the data centre industry is an exciting place to work, there are lots of different types of jobs, and you can make a great career in it, here's some examples of them, and get people excited, and there's an immense amount we can do with internships, and I know you do some of this in your company as well, through exposing people to different types jobs. But going through all those different early engineering jobs helps us learn and then choose a path. So I think we probably need to be more structured and maybe through industry associations we can enable some of that.

Jeff Van Zetten: I feel like we have to almost do a bit of a campaign for the younger generation about if you've got issues, come and join us and help us fix it. Like, it feels like there's something there that the youngsters could gravitate towards. There's a lot of them have get up and go and they just need to mobilise. Just don't complain about the future, help us create it and fix it.

Simon McFadden: One of the things we've noticed is there's an exponential growth in data, which has led to an exponential growth in really an investment in this sector. And that's increasing jobs exponentially across the whole sector. And you can see that over the last couple of days. We need to bring more people on board. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for your time today. Really appreciate it making some time on a very busy couple of days here in Singapore.

Jeff Van Zetten: Thanks Simon and thanks to Aurecon, good partners and it's amazing what we've done together.

Simon McFadden: Thank you.

Jeff Van Zetten: And I'm excited about what we're doing in the future we're creating together.

Simon McFadden: Likewise.

Jeff Van Zetten: Thanks.

Simon McFadden: Thank you.

Courtney Lock: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Engineering Reimagined, recorded live at Data Centre World Asia in Singapore.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from today’s episode is that the future of the industry isn’t just about technology. It’s also about people and bringing more talent into the industry to overcome the challenges ahead.

Please do check out the other three episodes that we have recorded at Data Centre World for Engineering Reimagined – we have interviewed leaders from NTT, Keppel and K2 about power, land and talent, the forces shaping Asia Pacific’s data centre landscape.

These podcasts are available wherever you get your podcasts and if you have enjoyed this Data Centre World podcast episode please do share with a friend.

You can also subscribe to Engineering Reimagined wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss the next one.

Until next time, I’m Courtney Lock. Thanks for listening.

Delivering data centres at speed, scale and growing complexity

Data centres are growing at an extraordinary pace, with projects that once delivered around 20 megawatts of capacity now scaling to hundreds of megawatts and even gigawatt-scale campuses.

In this episode, recorded live at Data Centre World Asia in Singapore, Aurecon’s Industry Director for Digital Infrastructure Simon McFadden speaks with Jeff Van Zetten, Chief of Engineering and Design at NEXTDC, about keeping pace with this rapid growth.

As data centres increase in scale, bespoke designs are giving way to greater standardisation, while operators are securing critical equipment earlier and in greater volumes to manage supply chain constraints.

Simon and Jeff explore how standardisation, supply chain diversity and advances in engineering are shaping the next generation of data centres. Jeff also shares the responsibility he takes and encourages others to in addressing concerns about AI and data centre growth and why a different talent solution is needed to bring more skills quickly to the industry.

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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individual speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host, the organisation, or any affiliated entities.