Nvidia backs a 2-gigawatt AI infrastructure buildout across Australia with eight local partners
Sharon AI alone plans to deploy up to 68,000 Nvidia GPUs; IREN is building an 800MW campus in South Australia -- hyperscale AI capacity expanding into a new region with its own energy and grid constraints.
Nvidia announced a partnership with eight Australian data-center firms on September 9, 2026 -- Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, Megaport, ResetData, CDC, NEXTDC, and AirTrunk -- to expand the country's AI infrastructure capacity toward roughly 2 gigawatts by 2027, hosting multiple generations of Nvidia's DSX AI-factory compute platforms. Sharon AI alone plans to deploy up to 68,000 Nvidia GPUs with Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum-X networking; IREN is building an 800-megawatt campus in South Australia. Partner Firmus has branded the effort "Project Southgate," tied to roughly $10 billion in financing per subsequent coverage.
A new region, not just more of the same capacity
Nvidia VP Raj Mirpuri described the logic behind the push: "AI factories turn energy into intelligence -- the essential resource of the AI economy." Committing multi-gigawatt capacity to Australia specifically, rather than expanding existing US or Asian hubs further, expands hyperscale AI infrastructure into a region with its own energy market, grid constraints, and data-residency rules -- a genuinely new set of operating conditions, not just additional square footage.
What this means for regional latency and data-residency planning
For engineering leaders assessing where to run AI workloads that need to stay close to Asia-Pacific users or comply with regional data-residency requirements, a 2-gigawatt buildout across eight operators is a concrete signal that meaningful new regional capacity is coming online, not just a single company's announcement -- multiple named local providers competing to host the same platform generation adds real optionality on the provider side, not just raw capacity.