Australian AI technology company, Firmus, recently signed a deal with the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, to provide its computing capacity from two planned Malaysian datacentres. The deal is a multi-year arrangement that comes after NVIDIA’s stock value fell by approximately 1.5% yesterday.
Firmus isn’t a household name, and it currently leases its datacentres in Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. With regard to its home country, it is building its own datacentres in Tasmania. Unfortunately, the company itself has declined to provide further details about its planned Malaysian site, including when it plans to start operating and how much power it facilities would consume.
The deal between Firmus and OpenAI does provide some insight: as per its contract, the total contracted capacity — that’s the maximum amount of power clients sign up to use — across all its sites in the Asia Pacific — is up to 900MW, which is an exponential increase from 155MW in April.
If it wasn’t already clear, Firmus’ datacentres will be powered by NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure. As for which architecture it uses to power its services, the company’s highest and most powerful offering is a system powered by NVIDIA’s Blackwell architecture.
On a sidebar, Firmus has reportedly expressed plans to purchase and deploy Vera Rubin processors at scale, as and when they are able to, across the Asia Pacific.
On another note, the projected 900MW only measures power capacity and not NVIDIA’s revenue. Basically, that means the real prize for the GPU brand will depend on processor volume, deployment timing, as well as the economics behind the partnership with Firmus.
On yet another sidebar, it is likely that the location of Firmus’ planned datacentres will be built within the state of Johor: its size and land mass compared to other states in the Peninsular notwithstanding, it’s also the state with the closest proximity to Singapore. Couple that with the current incentive being provided by our government, both on a federal and state level, as well as the participation from other tech giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, and NVIDIA, there’s little wonder why Firmus has chosen Malaysia as a potential hub for its Asia Pacific operations.
