Nvidia announced a partnership with eight infrastructure companies to enable up to 2 gigawatts (GW) of capacity dedicated to artificial intelligence in Australia by 2027, in an expansion that could surpass all the computing capacity currently installed in the country's data centers.
Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, Megaport, ResetData, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk are participating in the initiative. The operators will be responsible for the facilities, while Nvidia will provide its platform DSX, as well as accelerated computing systems, networking, software and ecosystem support.
The scale of the project is significant given the existing infrastructure. Australia currently has about 1.6 GW of computing capacity in data centers, according to a survey by Data Centres Australia with data from DC Byte cited by Reuters. The volume planned by the companies, therefore, would be greater than the load installed in the country today.
The infrastructure will be prepared for different generations of Nvidia equipment and for high-density workloads, such as training and running AI models. The company says the expansion should broaden access to accelerated computing for Australian companies, universities, researchers and developers.
Expansion increases pressure on energy
Among the projects cited, Firmus is expanding Project Southgate, while IREN plans to apply Nvidia's architecture at its campus of 800 MW in southern Australia. Sharon AI expects to deploy up to 68,000 Nvidia GPUs, and CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk are preparing facilities with cooling systems capable of supporting high-density equipment.
The push comes amid a race to transform Australia into a hub for AI and data center infrastructure. The scale of these projects, however, also broadens the discussion about electricity availability and resource consumption. Nvidia said the expansion could require and support new power generation projects to meet regional and global demand for AI computing.
