At a glance
- Australian AI companies are buying their own processors and renting space in local data centres to run them.
- Maincode, a Melbourne company that builds the Matilda language model, published its own benchmark results on 25 May 2026 from a A$30 million AMD cluster in Melbourne.
- Sovereign Australia AI ordered 256 NVIDIA B200 processors through Sharon AI in September 2025, for a NEXTDC data centre in Melbourne.
- The Australian Financial Review reported on 27 August 2026 that a Buy Australian AI program will introduce start-ups to technology buyers at four banks and the payments provider Cuscal.
- Canada already pays for this. Its fund covers two-thirds of a small company's approved costs for cloud computing bought at home, and half when it is bought abroad.
Buy Australian AI gives start-ups access to bank technology buyers
The Australian Financial Review reported on 27 August 2026 that the Assistant Minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy, Andrew Charlton, has announced a program called Buy Australian AI, run by the start-up group Stone & Chalk.
Cohorts of Australian AI companies take an eight-week course in the technical, regulatory, security and operational requirements of selling to large companies, and are then introduced to technology buyers at four major banks and the payments provider Cuscal. Charlton told the paper that Australia is in "a sliding doors moment" and needs to be "a creator and not just a renter" of AI, and that the challenge for the country's AI companies is getting in front of the organisations that can buy their products.
Two founders quoted in the article were critical of the program. Trellis Data chief executive Michael Gately said an incubator-level program arrives too late for a company at his scale, and that what he needs is for the chief information officer at a major bank to see that viable local options exist. Maincode chief executive Dave Lemphers called it "performance theatre" and said local companies need salary-backed, debt-financed investment. Stone & Chalk chief executive Stela Solar put the case the other way: pairing start-ups with large organisations sends a demand signal to local innovators to build here.
Charlton had already pointed at data centres. He told the Australian National University on 18 August 2026, nine days before the program was announced, that Australia should climb the AI value chain and supply more than the buildings and the power. He named the compute-access expectation the government published in March as the instrument for it.
Maincode and Sovereign Australia AI reached Australian data centre capacity by paying for the machines themselves.
Three Australian buyers own the machines they run on
Maincode is a Melbourne company that builds Matilda, which it describes as a chat model and coding agent running on hardware it owns. In October 2025 it announced a A$30 million investment in a cluster it calls MC-2, built on AMD Instinct MI355X processors and housed at Telstra's Clayton campus in Melbourne.
Maincode published benchmark results from the Melbourne cluster to its own site on 25 May 2026, measuring how fast the machines produce text for two openly published models under heavy load. The larger of the two ran at roughly 1,310 tokens a second, or about 900 words, across 256 requests at once.
Sovereign Australia AI, which launched in September 2025, ordered 256 NVIDIA B200 processors through Sharon AI that month, for NEXTDC's M3 facility in Melbourne.
Universities buy this way too. La Trobe University announced on 2 June 2025 that it would commission three NVIDIA DGX H200 systems at NEXTDC's M2 facility in Tullamarine, backed by a A$10 million Victorian government investment through mRNA Victoria, as the foundation of its Australian Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Medical Innovation.
Sharon AI names Canva as a customer in its American filing
Sharon AI, the company that supplied those processors, made a disclosure of its own in the United States. Its registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission names Canva as a customer under a contract signed in early 2026. The filing lists Canva alongside GMI Cloud, a Californian company it calls an industry participant. Canva was also an investor. Forbes Australia reported on 25 August 2026 that Canva was one of the largest participants in a US$103 million convertible note round in December 2025. Those notes converted in June 2026 into a holding of just over one per cent.
Australia's neocloud providers sell computing by the hour, which is the alternative to owning it. They have raised billions of dollars in the past twelve months to buy the machines they rent out. Firmus announced a fully subscribed US$2 billion equity investment on 7 August 2026. Sharon AI closed US$1.6 billion on 29 June 2026 and is installing processors inside NEXTDC facilities in Melbourne and Sydney.
Firmus announced its second large-scale customer for Project Southgate on 2 March 2026, on a contract it described as long-term, covering approximately 18,400 NVIDIA GB300 processors at the Melbourne site it calls Southgate's first Australian deployment.
The fifth national expectation asks compute providers to open access
The last of the Australian government's five expectations of data centres and AI infrastructure developers, published on 23 March 2026, is addressed to providers of large-scale compute, naming hyperscalers and neoclouds. It asks them to enable access for Australian start-ups, innovative small businesses, researchers and not-for-profits on favourable terms. Any major investment should also deploy engineers and researchers in Australia and invest in Australian supply chains.
The document says the government "will prioritise proposals most closely aligned with the expectations", and that energy-intensive data centre proposals not closely aligned with them "will not be prioritised by Commonwealth regulatory assessments". Australia's major operators have been measured against the full set.
Forbes Australia reported on 17 August 2026 that Charlton said his office is working with the Minister for Industry and Innovation, Tim Ayres, to require hyperscalers to provide that access.
Canada has funded compute access since December 2024
Canada announced a Sovereign AI Compute Strategy on 5 December 2024, funded at up to C$2 billion over five years. The AI Compute Access Fund, a pool of up to C$300 million, meets some of the cost when a small or medium Canadian company buys computing time.
The fund covers two-thirds of a company's approved costs when it buys Canadian cloud computing, and half when it buys the same computing abroad. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada announced the first awards on 12 May 2026: C$66 million across 44 companies.
The strategy's other arm, the AI Compute Challenge, made its first award to Cohere, the Toronto model developer, at up to C$240 million in March 2025. Julie Sobowale reported in The Walrus in November 2025 that CoreWeave, an American company, builds and runs the capacity that award paid for.
Australia asks for the same access in the fifth expectation, and sets out its wider approach in the National AI Plan of 2 December 2025.
What this means
Maincode paid A$30 million for its own cluster. OpenAI's Australian announcement offered selected start-ups up to US$15,000 in credits.
Buying the machines and renting a room for them costs tens of millions before anything runs. That is what Maincode, Sovereign Australia AI and La Trobe did. Maincode put A$30 million into its Melbourne cluster. Forbes Australia reported in August 2025 that Stake co-founder Ed Craven is the company's majority investor. La Trobe's centre had A$10 million from the Victorian government.
A start-up cannot. It can afford to rent computing by the hour, and that is where the fifth expectation is aimed. Buy Australian AI works on the people who buy software inside four banks and a payments provider.
Australia has already run a scheme where the government bought the product itself. Under the Business Research and Innovation Initiative, five of the nine companies that reached proof of concept had their product bought by the agency that set them the problem, on a 2021 evaluation for the industry department. The government told the Senate in December 2025 it had closed the pilot to new rounds.
Ireland's energy regulator wrote numbers into its own access rule in December 2025. New large users there have to match the capacity they ask for with generation or storage, and cover 80 per cent of their power with new Irish renewables. Australia's expectation asks for access on favourable terms. OpenAI's Australian announcement in December 2025 offered selected start-ups up to US$15,000 in credits to use its models.
Three things decide whether an expectation like this changes anything: whether it names a number, whether it reaches the companies a start-up would actually buy from, and whether it pays for any of it. Ireland's rule names 80 per cent. Australia's is addressed to hyperscalers and neoclouds, and the work in Charlton's office is on hyperscalers. Canada's fund covers two-thirds at home and half abroad. The Australian companies already running on Australian machines paid for them themselves.
What to watch
Whether the fifth expectation becomes binding, and on whom. The expectation as published names both hyperscalers and neoclouds. Forbes Australia reported that the work in the minister's office is on hyperscalers.
What the four banks and Cuscal have each agreed to supply. The Australian Financial Review's account describes an eight-week course run by Stone & Chalk, and introductions to technology buyers afterwards. What the five institutions committed to sits behind that.
The National Computational Infrastructure's A$32.2 million award. NCI won it under the 2025 Step Change Round of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, to build a national AI and machine learning compute capability. NCI reported in November 2025 that researchers asked for nearly three times the time available that year on Australia's two national supercomputers. The hardware, the vendor and the timeline have not been published.