AI infrastructure builders on Australia's Top 100 Innovators

At a glance

• Robin Khuda, who moved from Dhaka to Sydney at 18, makes The Australian's Top 100 Innovators for a third straight year, filed in 2026 under AI infrastructure.

• Baseten's Australian-raised founders run a US$13 billion AI company whose name Tuhin Srivastava traces to the counting blocks of an Australian classroom.

• Maincode's Dave Lemphers put A$30 million into his own Melbourne AI factory and says the first one was built "because we needed to".

• Datacom's Lou Compagnone and grid software company Neara, both of whom gave Certified Strategic exclusives, make the list under software and energy.

• Health holds 25 of the 100 places and software 21, and many of those entries are AI products that run on the infrastructure these founders build.

Robin Khuda arrived in Sydney from Dhaka in 1997, aged 18, to study accounting. He went on to found AirTrunk, and when the company struggled to attract investors he put almost all of his personal savings into it. In 2024 Blackstone and CPP Investments bought AirTrunk in a deal valuing it at more than A$24 billion, and Khuda still runs it. On 6 November 2026 The Australian named him one of the country's Top 100 Innovators for the third year running.

Khuda is one of seven entries on the 2026 list building, financing or powering Australia's AI infrastructure. The other six are:

• James Manning, Andrew Leece and Nick Hughes-Jones of Sharon AI, which rents out GPU capacity for AI work

• Tuhin Srivastava and Phil Howes, the Australian-raised co-founders of Baseten, a US$13 billion AI company in San Francisco

• Dave Lemphers of Maincode, who built his own AI factory in Melbourne

• Lou Compagnone of Datacom, which owns five data centres in New Zealand

• Paula Taylor and Peter Rossdeutscher of Sovereign Green Compute, which is lining up land and power with Traditional Owners in Western Australia

• Daniel Danilatos of Neara, which maps spare capacity in the grid

Compagnone and Neara have both given Certified Strategic exclusive interviews.

The Australian's technology desk publishes the list each year, unranked, and pitched the 2026 intake as founders "mounting an aggressive push for domestic tech sovereignty". It sorts the 100 into 13 categories. AirTrunk and Sharon AI sit under AI infrastructure, and the other five are filed under software and energy.

Robin Khuda, AirTrunk

Before AirTrunk, Khuda was chief financial officer at PIPE Networks and then NEXTDC. He has said he watched cloud services grow from around 2010 and saw the opportunity in the data centres behind them. In 2024 The Australian filed him under manufacturing, hardware and infrastructure; in 2026 it filed him under AI infrastructure. AirTrunk now builds across Asia as well as Australia, and in June 2026 it announced plans to invest more than US$30 billion in data centres in India by 2030, next door to the country Khuda left at 18.

Tuhin Srivastava and Phil Howes, Baseten

Tuhin Srivastava and Phil Howes are two of the four co-founders of Baseten, set up in San Francisco in 2019. Srivastava told Fortune the company is named after the blocks Australian children learn to count with: "I grew up in Australia. And, in Australia, you learn to count with these 'base ten' blocks," he said. "They're the building blocks of how you count, how you operate."

The company runs AI models for other businesses on GPU capacity, the work known as inference, and counts the AI coding tool Cursor among its customers. In June 2026 it raised US$1.5 billion at a US$13 billion valuation, and Blackbird said its share of the round was the Australian venture firm's biggest investment.

James Manning, Andrew Leece and Nick Hughes-Jones, Sharon AI

James Manning, Andrew Leece and Nick Hughes-Jones are the founding team of Sharon AI, the one entry that shares the AI infrastructure category with Khuda. Sharon AI is one of the neocloud providers in Australia, renting out GPU capacity for AI work, and Manning, its co-founder, stepped into the chief executive role in January 2026.

In August the company said it had secured 212MW of data centre capacity across Australia and New Zealand, 120MW of it contracted.

Dave Lemphers, Maincode

Dave Lemphers co-founded Maincode in Melbourne to build AI models from scratch, including its Matilda model, and found early hardware options did not match the depth or pace the team needed. "We built our first factory because we needed to," he said when Maincode announced its second. "We wanted AI that could think and reason in the ways businesses actually work."

That second factory, MC-2, is an A$30 million AMD-based cluster in Melbourne, built to train and run AI models on large clusters of specialised chips. Maincode is one of the Australian AI companies that buy the chips and rent the space, and Lemphers says of MC-2: "We're using the best technology in the world and applying it with Australian inventiveness."

Lou Compagnone, Datacom

Lou Compagnone is director of AI at Datacom, the New Zealand-founded technology group that owns five data centres in New Zealand and works with AirTrunk to give its Australian customers capacity in Sydney and Melbourne. She has spent 20 years in the field and came to it through service design and digital transformation rather than engineering. She also hosts the AI Ready Women podcast.

In her exclusive Q&A with Certified Strategic in August, she argued that where an AI workload runs should be decided while the use case is being scoped, and set out sovereignty as three layers: Australian-located, Australian-controlled and Australian-owned. On the chief AI officer role, she said: "If they're still running pilots at six months, something has gone wrong!"

Paula Taylor and Peter Rossdeutscher, Sovereign Green Compute

Paula Taylor, chief executive, and Peter Rossdeutscher, a former chief executive of mining software company Micromine and chair of Quantum Australia, lead Sovereign Green Compute from offices in Perth and Port Hedland. The company calls itself "an origination and governance platform for Australia's AI infrastructure buildout". It secures power, land, connectivity and government support for AI compute projects in Western Australia, through partnerships with Traditional Owner groups, before handing them to builders and infrastructure investors.

Its advisers include Michael Woodley of Yindjibarndi Energy and Tyrone Garstone, chief executive of the Kimberley Land Council. The Australian filed it under energy.

Daniel Danilatos, Neara

Daniel Danilatos co-founded Neara in Sydney to build engineering-grade digital models of electricity networks, and the company reached an A$1.1 billion valuation in February 2026. In its exclusive interview with Certified Strategic in June, Neara's vice president of commercial, Tom Gooch, said its modelling puts up to 10GW of unused capacity in NSW's distribution network, room that could connect data centres without waiting a decade for new transmission. The Australian filed Neara under energy.

Health, software and energy fill 60 of the 100 places

Beyond the seven, three of The Australian's 13 categories hold 60 places between them. Health is the biggest, with 25 entries, and much of it is AI used in clinics: Heidi Health and Lyrebird Health make AI tools that write up a doctor's notes from a consultation, and Harrison.ai builds models that read medical images. Software, technology and AI holds 21, among them Leonardo.AI, the image-generation business Canva bought in 2024, and Lorikeet, which builds AI customer-support agents. Energy takes 14, mostly grid software, storage and electrification businesses such as Neara, Amber Electric and GridCog.

Hardware and deep technology make up another fifth of the list. Manufacturing holds 10 places, from Seeing Machines' driver-monitoring technology to AMSL Aero's electric aircraft. Quantum computing and space hold five each, and the quantum entries are led by PsiQuantum, which is building a utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane with A$940 million in Australian Government and Queensland Government funding committed in 2024. Impact and Web3 businesses take five places each, fintech and arts three each, and education and agriculture one each.

Sovereignty is the theme The Australian chose for the 2026 list, and it runs through the AI infrastructure entries. AMD's case study describes Maincode's factory as built for "sovereign, cost-efficient AI systems for Australian enterprises", Datacom calls its New Zealand facilities sovereign data centres, and Sovereign Green Compute carries the word in its name. The Australian also notes that many of the 2026 entries held their place from 2025.

Source: The Australian, Top 100 Innovators, 6 November 2026.

What to watch

Sharon AI's GPU build. The company is targeting more than 64,000 NVIDIA GPUs by mid-2027 in data centres in Australia and New Zealand.

Sovereign Green Compute's first named project. The company hands projects to builders and investors once power, land and connectivity are secured, and a first named project would add Western Australia to the AI data centre pipeline.