At a glance

  • Firmus Technologies and DayOne will co-develop a 360MW NVIDIA DSX AI factory campus in Batam, Indonesia, the company's first build outside Australia.

  • The campus is sized for up to 170,000 NVIDIA GPUs across the Grace Blackwell, Vera Rubin and Vera platforms, delivered from the first quarter of 2027 into early 2028.

  • Firmus says it expects between US$25 billion and US$30 billion from committed offtake agreements over the first six years of an NVIDIA partnership that runs to 2034.

  • The Batam campus is multi-tenant and aimed at AI-native customers, a different buyer from the hyperscalers Firmus targets at its Australian Project Southgate sites.

  • Batam is the Indonesian corner of the Singapore-Johor-Riau triangle and has become the overflow market for compute that cannot be built in land and power constrained Singapore.

  • Firmus is the first Australian-founded operator to commit a hyperscale campus to Batam specifically. AirTrunk and NEXTDC, the other Australian names in the region, sit in Johor and Kuala Lumpur.

An Australian AI factory company builds its first campus offshore

Firmus Technologies and DayOne will co-develop a 360MW NVIDIA DSX AI factory campus in Batam, Indonesia, under an NVIDIA compute partnership that the company says runs to 2034. The campus is sized for up to 170,000 NVIDIA GPUs across the Grace Blackwell, Vera Rubin and Vera generations, with delivery staged from the first quarter of 2027 into the start of 2028. Bloomberg reported the agreement on 28 June 2026.

The technical core is the pairing of NVIDIA DSX, NVIDIA's full-stack reference design for AI factories, with HyperCube, the liquid-cooled architecture Firmus developed in Australia. The same architecture sits behind Firmus's Australian campuses, so Batam is the first export of a design Firmus built at home.

The Batam campus differs from Firmus's domestic work in two respects. It is multi-tenant and aimed at AI-native customers, the model and inference companies that buy raw GPU capacity, where the Australian sites are anchored by hyperscale tenants. And it is offshore: every prior Firmus campus sits inside Australia under Project Southgate, the national rollout the company runs with CDC and NVIDIA.

The US$25-30bn offtake and the ASX float

Firmus says it expects US$25 billion to US$30 billion from committed offtake over the partnership's first six years. By its account that is demand already under contract, not a forecast of business it still has to win.

Customer contracts held the float back. When Firmus took its pre-IPO pitch to institutions earlier in 2026, the reported weak point was the contract book. The float, which has been billed as the largest AI infrastructure listing in front of the ASX, was reported as targeting mid-year and then slipping toward September, and Capital Brief reported that sources close to the company say no date is confirmed. A committed book worth tens of billions, disclosed publicly, is the evidence those institutions wanted.

Firmus arrives at this point well capitalised. It raised US$505 million in April 2026 at a US$5.5 billion post-money valuation, with Coatue leading and NVIDIA participating, on top of a US$10 billion debt facility led by Blackstone and Coatue finalised in February. NVIDIA has been an equity investor since 2025. The Batam structure extends that relationship: Firmus buys NVIDIA infrastructure and sells NVIDIA-powered cloud services, and NVIDIA takes product revenue plus a share of the cloud revenue on top. It is the same alignment that put Firmus among the Australian names in NVIDIA's Vera Rubin launch cohort, now expressed as a single offshore campus.

Batam, and why compute is moving there

Batam is an island in Indonesia's Riau Islands province, about twenty kilometres south of Singapore across the strait. It forms the Indonesian corner of the Singapore-Johor-Riau growth triangle, with Johor in Malaysia as the other cross-border market. It offers land and power that Singapore does not have, within ferry distance of it.

The pull comes from Singapore's own constraints. Singapore ran an effective freeze on new large data centre approvals from 2019 to 2022, and even after lifting it the city-state releases capacity in tightly rationed tranches under sustainability conditions. Demand that cannot be built in Singapore has to land nearby, and Batam and Johor are the two places near enough to serve Singapore-adjacent workloads. Nongsa, the digital district on Batam's north coast, was designated a special economic zone for the digital economy in 2021, adding tax and tariff benefits, and the Nongsa to Changi subsea cable links the island directly into Singapore's network.

Batam runs its own island grid through PLN Batam, separate from Indonesia's national system. The single largest commitment on that grid is DayOne's roughly 450MW power purchase agreement with PLN Batam, signed in April 2026 and described by DayOne as Indonesia's largest. DayOne is the partner on the Firmus campus. Its Batam build-out centres on the Kabil Tech Park site behind that PPA, which places the 360MW Firmus development inside the same operator's expansion. Singapore is competing for the same power. It is trying to import low-carbon electricity from the region, targeting 6GW of imports by 2035 with a large Indonesian solar component. Batam's land and renewable capacity are therefore pulled two ways, toward its own data centre load and toward the export market across the strait.

Batam already has a cluster of operators building there.

Operator

Batam project

Scale

Status

DayOne (GDS International)

Kabil campus plus Nongsa facility

~450MW PPA, plus ~72MW at Nongsa

PPA signed April 2026, phased through 2027

Princeton Digital Group

Nongsa Digital Park campus

~96MW

Development

BW Digital

Nongsa campus

~80MW

Development, paired with the Nongsa-Changi cable

NeutraDC (Telkom), Singtel, Medco Power

Kabil Industrial Estate

~51MW, first phase ~20MW

Under construction, renewable supply via Medco

Gaw Capital and Sinar Primera

Golden Digital Gateway, Nongsa

Colocation

Opened February 2025

Source: Primary company disclosures and Data Center Dynamics reporting, June 2026.

Underneath the build-out sits Indonesian policy. Data localisation rules push certain categories of data to be stored and processed onshore, and the country's personal data protection law and national AI roadmap point the same way. That gives Batam a second customer beyond Singapore overflow: Indonesian data that has to stay in Indonesia, served from a site with international-grade connectivity.

Indonesian policy points demand the same way. Data localisation rules require certain categories of data to be stored and processed onshore, and the country's personal data protection law and national AI roadmap reinforce it. That gives Batam a second customer beyond Singapore overflow: Indonesian data that must stay in Indonesia, served from a site with international-grade connectivity.

The Australian operators are spread across the triangle

Firmus is the first Australian-founded operator to commit a hyperscale campus to Batam specifically. It is not the only Australian name in the broader region, but the others sit in different corners of it.

Operator

Where in the region

Scale

Notable

Firmus

Batam, Indonesia

360MW campus

First Australian-founded operator with a Batam campus; multi-tenant, AI-native

AirTrunk

Johor, Malaysia

700MW+ across four campuses

Australian-founded, Macquarie-owned; the largest Australian play in the triangle

NEXTDC

Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo

KL1 at 65MW

ASX-listed; its Asia pipeline runs through Malaysia and Japan, not Indonesia

Source: Primary company disclosures, June 2026.

AirTrunk went to Johor, the larger overflow market, where we have weighed Johor against the Australian build. NEXTDC went to Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo. Firmus chose Batam, and paired with DayOne, a local hyperscale platform, instead of building a grid relationship from scratch.

For the neocloud peer group, the question is capital and customer type. Firmus, alongside IREN and Sharon AI, belongs to the operator class we have tracked as the new hyperscaler tier. Batam shows one of them taking that model into a foreign market on the strength of an NVIDIA partnership and a committed book. That is a different growth path from IREN's North American build or Sharon AI's Australian capacity inside NEXTDC.

What this means for the Australian build

Firmus has not stepped back from Australia. On 29 June it announced a 600MW energy supply agreement in South Australia, linked to 1.2GW of new renewable generation and battery storage, as part of Project Southgate. That followed its confirmation earlier in June of AI factory sites near Tailem Bend and Port Augusta in the state. The domestic build and the Batam campus are advancing in parallel.

Batam also changes how Firmus looks ahead of a listing. It is no longer only a domestic developer signing hyperscale tenants at home; it is exporting an Australian-designed AI factory architecture into the Singapore-adjacent compute market, with a committed book worth tens of billions and NVIDIA on both the supply and revenue side.

What to watch

The next disclosures to track are the precise Batam site within DayOne's footprint, the named launch customers behind the committed offtake, and whether the Batam book is enough to bring the ASX float back to market on the timeline the company has signalled.