SharonAI Holdings and its subsidiaries announced it has entered a strategic investment partnership with Digital Alpha that could provide up to $200 million of equity and revenue-share capital, alongside an exclusive technology partnership with Cisco aimed at scaling AI and high-performance cloud compute infrastructure across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
The company, which markets itself as a “neocloud” focused on enterprise-grade high-performance computing for AI workloads, said the funding and partnership framework will be used to expand its GPU compute footprint and support customer demand for NVIDIA-accelerated computing and Cisco networking technology, targeting research, government and enterprise users. Sharon AI said its platform is engineered for workloads such as large language model training, fine-tuning and real-time inference, and is supported by a proprietary orchestration and automation layer intended to simplify deployment and management of high-performance GPU resources.
Digital Alpha Managing Partner Rick Shrotri said the firm views Sharon AI as part of a new wave of cloud infrastructure providers designed to deliver AI workloads and high-performance compute to enterprise and public sector customers, and said the partnership is intended to help scale Sharon AI across Australia and the broader region.
Sharon AI Chairman and Co-Founder James Manning said the combination of Digital Alpha’s investment and Cisco’s technology partnership would accelerate customer deployments and expand the company’s cloud infrastructure capabilities for enterprise AI and high-performance compute throughout Australia and Asia Pacific.
Cisco said the collaboration is designed to bring “sovereign” AI infrastructure offerings to market for Australian businesses, leveraging Cisco technologies including UCS servers, Nexus Hyperfabric switching, and its security and observability stack. Will Eatherton, Cisco’s SVP and Head of Networking Engineering, said Sharon AI is positioned to deliver critical enterprise AI use cases such as inference and retrieval-augmented generation, and that Cisco is partnering with the company to support advanced AI platform deployments.
Sharon AI, Digital Alpha, and Cisco said the three-way partnership is expected to support expanded and accelerated AI infrastructure deployments, as well as full-stack compute, network, and storage integration to meet customer requirements in research, enterprise, and government environments. Digital Alpha said its approach to AI infrastructure investing is informed by its strategic relationship with Cisco and its experience across portfolio companies including Massed Compute, PacketFabric and Cloudian.
KEY QUOTES:
“Sharon AI represents the next generation of cloud infrastructure providers delivering AI workloads and high-performance compute to enterprise and public sector customers. We are excited to partner with the Sharon AI team to scale the Company across the Australia and Asia-Pacific region.”
Rick Shrotri, Managing Partner, Digital Alpha
“This partnership with Digital Alpha and Cisco enables us to further accelerate customer deployments and expand our cloud infrastructure for enterprise AI and high-performance compute in Australia and Asia Pacific.”
James Manning, Co-Founder and Chairman, Sharon AI
“Sharon AI is poised to lead the Australian enterprise AI space, delivering critical use cases like inference and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Powered by Cisco’s UCS servers, Nexus Hyperfabric switching, security, and observability stack, Sharon AI provides a sovereign, high-performance infrastructure for Australian businesses. Cisco is thrilled to partner with Sharon AI to bring these advanced AI platforms to market.”
Will Eatherton, SVP, Head of Networking Engineering, Cisco
