NVIDIA announced on September 9 that it is working with eight Australian infrastructure providers on an AI factory buildout targeting up to 2 gigawatts of capacity by 2027. According to NVIDIA's official announcement, the partners will develop land, power and powered-shell capacity capable of hosting multiple generations of NVIDIA DSX infrastructure. The participating companies include Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, Megaport, ResetData, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk. NVIDIA will provide accelerated computing systems, networking equipment, software and technical support, while the participating companies will operate the facilities. Following the announcement, the NVIDIA share price remained unchanged at $223.67 during early trading.
The planned expansion involves Sharon AI's deployment of up to 68,000 NVIDIA GPUs connected through NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking. As reported by Reuters, IREN's planned 800-megawatt Bundey campus in South Australia is designed for 800 megawatts of capacity overall. Australia currently has approximately 1.6 gigawatts of computing capacity, according to Data Centres Australia and market researcher DC Byte figures cited by Reuters. The two-gigawatt figure represents a collective capacity target across multiple facilities rather than a single NVIDIA-owned data center. "AI factories turn energy into intelligence—the essential resource of the AI economy," said NVIDIA Vice President of Global AI Clouds and Infrastructure Ecosystem Raj Mirpuri. The buildout could reach two gigawatts by 2027, which is enough to power around 1.5 million homes.
IREN will combine NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture with its experience in power, land, data centers and GPU operations. The company has historically operated Bitcoin mining infrastructure but has increasingly expanded into AI cloud services and high-performance computing. CDC operates more than 550 megawatts across Australia and New Zealand, with another 800 megawatts under construction. The company claims its facilities use renewable electricity and zero-water cooling systems, though these environmental statements are company claims and have not been independently verified.
NVIDIA describes DSX as a full-stack AI factory platform covering facility design, computing, networking, software and reference architecture. The system is compatible with CUDA and is designed to support later generations of NVIDIA hardware without requiring operators to redesign every infrastructure layer. According to NVIDIA, expanded capacity would give Australian organizations greater access to NVIDIA Nemotron open models. Healthcare technology company Heidi is using Nemotron tools for clinical applications, while Atlassian is applying NVIDIA technology to semantic search and other features within its Rovo AI platform. Software leaders like Atlassian are already leveraging this local infrastructure to train language models and speech applications. Combining NVIDIA's technology with Heidi's clinical training and fine-tuning has helped Heidi reason across patient histories, clinical context and guidelines at scale, said Yu Liu, cofounder and chief technology officer of Heidi.
The capacity expansion comes as Australia positions itself as a global hub for data centre investment, while facing calls for tougher regulation over concerns about their environmental impact and heavy energy and water consumption. As reported by Reuters, NVIDIA said the capacity expansion would support Australia's demand for AI. "Growing AI adoption across industries is increasing demand for high-performance computing," NVIDIA stated. "Expanding capacity in Australia will enable local innovators to develop models, applications and agents while supporting additional power generation projects to support regional and global demand for AI compute." The partnership will give Australian innovators greater access to accelerated computing and NVIDIA models to develop locally relevant AI applications. "Australia's established sustainable energy and digital infrastructure, deep technology talent and reputation as a trusted global economic partner provide a strong foundation for startups, universities, researchers, enterprises, developers and AI-native companies to train, deploy and scale AI," NVIDIA said.
