Australia's AI startup Firmus and Singapore

[SYDNEY] Firmus Technologies will build its first data centre project in Indonesia as part of a partnership with US chip giant Nvidia, which the Australian artificial intelligence infrastructure firm said is expected to win it as much as US$30 billion in committed offtake agreements in its first six years.

Firmus and Singapore-based DayOne will develop a 360 megawatt Nvidia DSX AI Factory campus in Batam, Indonesia, an island just off the coast of Singapore, as part of an eight-year partnership with Nvidia, the company said.

While its Australian projects are focused on hyperscaler customers – a term used to describe the largest cloud computing companies – the Batan project will be a multi-tenant project for AI native customers, Firmus co-chief executive officer Tim Rosenfield told Bloomberg News in an interview.

The facility is under construction by DayOne and is set to go live in the first quarter of 2027, he said.

Firmus will be able to access Nvidia infrastructure for customers through a revenue-sharing and credit-support agreement, which covers as many as 170,000 Nvidia AI accelerator chips through 2027 and 2028, the company said.

Firmus expects to get US$25 billion to US$30 billion from committed offtake agreements during the first six years of the Nvidia partnership, it added.

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The deal comes as the Australian startup, valued at US$5.5 billion in an April investment round led by Coatue Management and backed by Nvidia, is expected to undertake an initial public offering this year. Rosenfield declined to comment on any IPO plans.

Worry over chip demand has created a volatile environment for AI stocks in recent weeks but that market sentiment is “largely irrelevant” to how Firmus is building its business, Rosenfield said.

“We’re building our business based on demand that we’re seeing from customers and contracts that we’re closing,” he said. “Funding and capital remains extremely strong, as we speak.”

Firmus, which began as a Bitcoin mining operation in the Australian state of Tasmania in 2019, has benefited from surging demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region, with a pipeline of data centre projects in Australia and Singapore.

The company last year signed an agreement with CDC Data Centers to develop data centres of as much as 1.6 gigawatts across Australia by 2028, powered by Nvidia chips.

Firmus has said previously that the Southgate project developed under that partnership has attracted an unnamed global hyperscaler customer. Rosenfield declined to name the firm. BLOOMBERG