In August, NextDC gave investors its revenue forecast for the year and last Wednesday cut that forecast by more than a fifth as well as its earnings forecast by more than a third, because the power connection to its biggest Melbourne data center (called M3) is running late enough to push the revenue into next year. The shares closed down ~42 percent, their lowest since 2018. On Monday, CEO Craig Scroggie gave up his bonus and share awards for the year. The board cut its own fees by 10 percent and dropped a plan to raise the cap on what directors can be paid.

So in August NextDC told investors what to expect, and then in October it had to take a big chunk of that back. Whatever the company says now, people will be asking the same thing: can we believe it this time?

Let’s start with the bonus, because it shows how closely people read a gesture.

Last year, NextDC was already in a fight about executive pay. At its annual meeting in November, 72 percent of votes went against the pay report after proxy advisers objected to a special incentive plan for Scroggie and his senior team (A$150 million in shares if the stock more than doubled by 2030, with A$50 million of that earmarked for Scroggie himself). In Australia, if shareholders vote against the pay plan two years in a row, they get to vote on whether to throw out the entire board. That second vote is on November 20, three weeks from now, so the bonus Scroggie gave up on Monday, worth about A$1.6 million at today’s share price, came from a board that’s about to face that vote. To be fair, at today’s share price that plan is so far underwater it would need the stock to roughly quintuple by 2030 to pay out. The shares fell again the same day. So yes, the gesture is real and it’s also a lot smaller than what the big shareholders already knew was still on the table.

Now the harder promise.

M3 is already running, but its customer wants more capacity, and that means more electricity than the local grid currently delivers. The problem is that NextDC doesn’t control that part. Jemena, the local power company, has to replace ordinary street poles in the surrounding neighborhoods with much taller ones carrying high-voltage lines. In September, residents started blocking the crews, and Jemena stopped work saying it couldn’t proceed safely or get onto the sites. The local council, which controls the roads the poles go on, hasn’t signed off either while more consultation takes place. Jemena says it won’t restart before February 2027, which pushes the extra power (and the revenue tied to it) into NextDC’s next financial year.

This isn’t a new fight by the way. The data center sits 15 meters from people’s houses, and locals call it Mordor after the evil Lord of the Rings realm. The complaints go back years; a constant hum, diesel backup generators kicking in during outages, and now 15-meter concrete poles carrying 66k volts along streets where people live. The cars and bins blocking the crews were the point where years of complaints turned into something that now stops the work.

Where the comms team comes in

There are two main audiences here and they’ve been burned differently.

Investors were given a number and then watched a third of it disappear so they want timing they can believe.

The people living next to M3 have been complaining about noise and diesel for years, watched the company seek to expand anyway, and now have high-voltage poles going up outside their homes. So they want evidence the company will change something, not just explain it better.

Those might sound like separate comms jobs but they really aren’t. The date investors want to believe depends on the poles going up, and the poles go up when the neighbors stop blocking the crews. So the community program is a deeply connected part of the investor story, and the next update should reflect that.

Here are the three questions a comms leader can put on the table to make sure they have.

1. What do investors need to hear before they believe the next date?

NextDC has said it will spend only on projects with customers already signed which makes sense. But before anyone puts a date on when that capacity starts paying, I’d want finance and ops to walk me through everything that still has to happen first. Which approvals are in hand? Which pieces of the work depend on someone else hitting a milestone? What would push the date back again?

Those are internal questions but the comms leader’s job is to then make sure every date the company is about to publish comes with the list of dependencies, each with a name next to it, and to push back on leadership when nobody responsible for hitting a date has actually said yes to it.

Then the public version has to say the same thing in the same way. Not “we expect power in FY28,” but “FY28 depends on the power company restarting the pole works. It has told us it won’t happen before February and hasn’t committed to a date beyond that. The council’s sign-off on the roads is still pending. Separately, our next expansion stages are waiting on a state planning decision now expected in 2027. Here’s what we’re doing on each.” That’s a lot more exposed than just a simple number but that’s also the point. If the February date slips, investors already know why and they know the company saw it coming.

2. What does the community need to see before they stop blocking the road?

NextDC says it already has people on the ground and sends residents regular newsletters about the site. I can’t judge that work from here, but angry neighbors don’t mean the message didn’t get through. What is on the record are complaints about living next to the site, not confusion about what it is. Look at what does bother them: a hum that never stops, diesel generators, a high-voltage pole outside the bedroom window. Those aren’t things you explain, they are things you fix. NextDC’s head of development has told investors the company is looking at other options, including burying the cables. And a change of plan (or a reason for why something can’t be changed and what will be done about it) is exactly what listening has to produce.

3. Who connects the two?

The poles belong to Jemena. Jemena wouldn’t answer Bloomberg’s questions, saying the matter involved a client relationship. NextDC’s statement says it supports Jemena’s consultation.

The residents do not care which company owns the poles, and neither, in the end, do the investors.

A comms leader can’t get a council to sign off or make a power company finish its work but what we can do is ask who brings unresolved community concerns into the project meetings, what they mean for the schedule, and when that reaches the people setting expectations for investors.

None of this proves NextDC ignored warnings, or that better communication would have kept the project on time but it sets the test for whatever the company says next.

Giving up the bonus shows the people at the top will share the pain. When the next update comes, I’ll be reading for something more useful than reassurance which is what’s still unresolved, who can fix it, and what the company will DO if they can’t. That’s what earns back the right to be believed.

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