The Nextdc Ltd (ASX:NXT) share price jumped higher today after the company announced increased contracted utilisation.
Nextdc builds and operates data centres, which are critical infrastructure for AI systems to run. Data centres are the infrastructure platform for the digital economy, delivering the critical power, security and connectivity for global cloud computing providers, enterprise and government. Nextdc says it has a strong focus on sustainability and operational excellence through renewable energy sources and delivering “world-class operational efficiency”.
Nextdc increased contract utilisation
The company announced today that after its recent customer contract wins its pro forma (company calculated) contracted utilisation has increased by 71MW (megawatts) to 316MW, this is an increase of 29% since 30 June 2025.
Thanks to these customer contract wins the company said that its pro forma forward order book has increased by 53% to 205MW since the start of FY26.
Higher capital expenditure guidance announced
Nextdc also announced today that its FY26 capital expenditure (capex) guidance has been increased by $400 million. The company said that it is accelerating a proportion of its planned inventory (data centre) expansion.
The additional capex required to build and deploy capacity for the new customer contracts takes the total planned capex to $2.2 billion to $2.4 billion (previously $1.8 billion to $2 billion).
Does this change FY26 guidance?
The company said that its FY26 net revenue growth and underlying EBITDA (EBITDA explained) guidance remains unchanged.
In the FY25 result, Nextdc said its FY26 net revenue guidance is expected to be between $390 million to $400 million (up from $350.2 million in FY25’s results).
Its underlying EBITDA for FY26 is expected to be between $230 million to $240 million (up from $216.7 million in FY25).
Is the Nextdc share price a buy?
The market was more excited by these developments earlier today, with the Nextdc share price rising over 5% within the first half an hour of trade this morning. Excitement has simmered down, with the share price now up around 1.5%.
The business is clearly benefitting from the strong demand for data centres and it has an impressive pipeline of data centres to take advantage of that.
I’m not sure how profitable Nextdc will become, so it’s hard to gauge what share price is a good level to buy at. Currently the Nextdc share price is down over 23% since September 2025.
It is a better time to buy now than at the September highs, however there are other ASX growth shares I’d look at first that aren’t as reliant on the success of the AI boom.
