Nvidia is throwing its weight behind Firmus, a Tasmania-based artificial intelligence start-up, in a deal that anchors one of the largest digital infrastructure pushes yet seen in the Asia-Pacific region.
According to The Jakarta Post, Firmus is set to build an Nvidia-powered data center on the Indonesian island of Batam, described as one of the Asia-Pacific's largest such facilities, under a multinational partnership. W.Media reports that Firmus is co-developing the project with a company called DayOne, and that the campus is planned at 360 megawatts of capacity.
The scale of the computing involved is striking. TechWire Asia reports the Batam campus will run on Nvidia infrastructure and use up to 170,000 GPUs — the specialized chips that power modern AI systems. Nikkei Asia frames the project as an Nvidia-backed "AI factory" in Indonesia.
The financial commitment is large and growing. The Australian Financial Review reports that Nvidia's evident enthusiasm for Firmus is stirring a new "$20 billion-plus spendathon." Startup Fortune reports that Firmus is putting its planned listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) behind this larger bet on Nvidia, suggesting the data center ambitions are central to the company's public-market story.
The sources do not spell out the full breakdown of who is contributing what, or the precise timeline for construction, beyond the partnership structure and capacity figures noted above.
Why it matters: the deal shows how the global race for AI computing power is spilling into new regions and binding chipmakers, start-ups and local infrastructure partners into multibillion-dollar commitments — with Southeast Asia emerging as a key staging ground for the data centers that AI depends on.