Firmus has entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with OpenAI under which OpenAI will contract dedicated AI compute capacity from two Firmus AI Factory sites in Malaysia.
The agreement makes OpenAI an anchor customer of Firmus and supports the deployment of additional AI Factory capacity across the company’s regional infrastructure platform.
With the OpenAI partnership, Firmus said its total contracted capacity across all customers has increased to more than 900 MW, providing a foundation for its next phase of expansion across the Asia-Pacific region.
Firmus currently has a portfolio spanning seven AI factories across Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Two sites are already operational in Australia and Singapore, while five additional facilities are under development and targeting ready-for-service dates over the next 24 months.
The expansion into Malaysia adds a fourth country to Firmus’ AI infrastructure footprint and gives the company additional capacity to support OpenAI and other customers seeking large-scale AI compute resources across Asia-Pacific.
Firmus is also planning to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin at scale across the region, bringing NVIDIA’s next-generation accelerated computing platform into its expanding AI factory network.
The company’s infrastructure strategy integrates power, cooling, accelerated computing hardware, networking, software and workload performance into a vertically integrated system.
Firmus plans to use the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Platform to combine NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems with its proprietary HyperCube platform.
HyperCube incorporates liquid cooling, mechanical systems and electrification into a repeatable infrastructure architecture designed to accelerate data center deployment.
The systems are manufactured and prefabricated in regional New South Wales, giving Firmus greater control over parts of the AI infrastructure supply and deployment process.
The company believes integrating more of the AI factory value chain can improve deployment speed, capital efficiency and operating performance while reducing the cost of producing AI tokens.
The OpenAI agreement comes as demand for AI infrastructure continues increasing across Asia-Pacific, with hyperscalers, enterprises and AI developers requiring greater access to high-density compute infrastructure.
Firmus is positioning its platform around what it describes as an “energy in and tokens out” model, focused on maximizing the efficiency of converting energy and infrastructure investment into AI compute output.
The company is vertically integrated from model to grid and uses proprietary energy and cooling technology to build and operate its AI infrastructure.
Alongside the OpenAI partnership, Firmus intends to establish an Australian AI Access Program aimed at expanding practical access to artificial intelligence for eligible researchers and organizations.
The proposed initiative is expected to support AI applications in areas including science, education, agriculture, energy and resource efficiency, and climate resilience.
Firmus is headquartered in Sydney and provides AI cloud infrastructure services across Asia-Pacific and other markets.
KEY QUOTES:
“This multi-year partnership marks the moment Asia-Pacific becomes a producer of intelligence, not just a consumer of it,” said Tim Rosenfield – Firmus Co-Founder and Co-CEO. Firmus has spent seven years building for this – a footprint that runs from Southeast Asia to Australia, and the manufacturing, technology and teams to bring it online at speed.”
Tim Rosenfield, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Firmus
“We’re excited to work with Firmus as we expand our global compute capacity. These new data centers in Malaysia will help us serve growing demand for OpenAI’s products across the region and around the world. We look forward to bringing this capacity online together,” said Sachin Katti, VP of Compute Strategy at OpenAI.
Sachin Katti, VP of Compute Strategy at OpenAI
“AI infrastructure demand is accelerating across Asia-Pacific, and meeting it requires full-stack AI factories engineered for performance, durability, efficiency, scale and fungible workloads,” said Nico Caprez, vice president of Global AI Infrastructure Growth at NVIDIA. “Built with NVIDIA DSX and powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, Firmus’ HyperCube-based AI factories will help bring advanced capacity online faster and produce intelligence at industrial scale with stronger token economics across the region.”
Nico Caprez, Vice President of Global AI Infrastructure Growth at NVIDIA
