Partnerships

Firmus Signs OpenAI as Anchor Customer for Malaysian AI Factories

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Australian AI infrastructure company Firmus Technologies and OpenAI announced a multi-year strategic partnership on September 8, 2026, 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 pushes the Sydney-headquartered company’s total contracted capacity across all customers beyond 900 MW, according to the Firmus announcement. The company said the contracted portfolio underpins the next phase of its regional growth.

Malaysia Extends a Four-Country Footprint

Firmus’ portfolio spans seven AI factories across four countries: Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. Two sites are operational today, in Australia and Singapore, while five are under development with a target of ready-for-service over the next 24 months. The Malaysian entry extends the company’s Asia-Pacific presence beyond its existing operations in the other three countries.

OpenAI framed the arrangement as an expansion of its global compute base. “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.

Firmus Co-Founder and Co-CEO Tim Rosenfield described the agreement as a turning point for the region, saying the partnership “marks the moment Asia-Pacific becomes a producer of intelligence, not just a consumer of it.” He said Firmus has spent seven years building a footprint running from Southeast Asia to Australia, together with the manufacturing, technology and teams to bring it online at speed.

Vera Rubin Hardware and the HyperCube Build

Firmus will deploy NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin accelerated computing platform at scale across Asia-Pacific as part of the partnership. The AI factories developed under it will use the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Platform to integrate Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems with Firmus’ own HyperCube platform.

The HyperCube combines advanced liquid cooling, mechanical systems and electrification into a repeatable infrastructure system that is manufactured and prefabricated in regional New South Wales. Firmus said bringing more of the AI factory value chain together is expected to improve deployment speed, capital efficiency and operating performance in support of a lower cost of token production.

NVIDIA’s vice president of Global AI Infrastructure Growth, Nico Caprez, said AI infrastructure demand is accelerating across Asia-Pacific and that meeting it requires full-stack AI factories engineered for performance, durability, efficiency, scale and fungible workloads. He said Firmus’ HyperCube-based AI factories, built with NVIDIA DSX and powered by Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, will help bring advanced capacity online faster and produce intelligence at industrial scale with stronger token economics across the region.

The Vera Rubin deployment builds on an existing hardware relationship between the two companies. In June 2026, Firmus announced a strategic compute partnership with NVIDIA running through 2034, anchored by a dedicated 360 MW NVIDIA DSX AI Factory campus in Batam, Indonesia. That agreement covers up to 170,000 NVIDIA AI accelerators across the Grace-Blackwell, Vera-Rubin and Vera platforms through 2027 and 2028, and Firmus said it expects to receive between US$25 and US$30 billion from committed offtake agreements during the partnership’s first six years. The Batam campus is being developed with DayOne, a Singapore-headquartered digital infrastructure platform.

Australian AI Access Program

Alongside the OpenAI partnership, Firmus said it intends to establish an Australian AI Access Program to support eligible researchers and organisations applying AI to areas of national and regional importance. The proposed program is expected to focus on applications in science, education, agriculture, energy and resource efficiency, and climate resilience.

Firmus Grid Limited, trading as Firmus Technologies, is headquartered in Sydney and provides AI cloud services across Asia-Pacific. The company describes itself as vertically integrated from model to grid, using proprietary energy and cooling technology to build and deliver its infrastructure. The five AI factories now under development across the region are scheduled to reach ready-for-service status within the next 24 months.

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Theo Nash is an AI-generated specialist at Unite.AI, covering AI infrastructure, compute, and the hardware systems that power modern artificial intelligence. His work focuses on the technical foundations behind large-scale AI workloads, including data centers, accelerators, networking, and the software stacks that tie them together.

With an analytical and engineering-driven perspective, Theo examines how advances in GPUs, custom silicon, memory architectures, and distributed systems enable new generations of AI models. He pays particular attention to performance trade-offs, energy efficiency, scalability, and the practical constraints that shape real-world deployment of AI infrastructure.

Articles authored by Theo Nash are AI-generated and reviewed by Unite.AI’s editorial team to ensure technical accuracy, clarity, and responsible coverage of the rapidly evolving AI compute landscape.