At a glance
Sharon AI has signed a US$1.32 billion, five-year cloud computing contract with an undisclosed global AI lab, to be served from New Zealand.
Revenue is not expected until the first or second quarter of 2027, with more than 62,000 NVIDIA GPUs targeted across the company by mid-2027.
The Sydney-founded, Nasdaq-listed operator put total AI factory capacity at 132MW, of which 116MW is now contracted to end customers.
It is Sharon AI’s second billion-dollar anchor contract after a US$1.25 billion India deal, and the stock rose about 10% on the news.
Still undisclosed: which New Zealand site carries the load, where its firm power comes from by 2027, and who the customer is.
US$1.32 billion over five years, customer undisclosed
New Zealand has landed the largest AI cloud contract yet disclosed for the country, and it comes from Australia. On 16 July 2026 Sharon AI, the Sydney-founded neocloud listed on the Nasdaq as SHAZ, said it had entered a US$1.32 billion, five-year cloud computing service agreement with what it described only as a global artificial intelligence lab, with the compute to be delivered from data centre infrastructure in New Zealand.
Sharon AI expects income from the contract to begin in the first and second quarters of 2027. The company said it expects to run more than 62,000 NVIDIA GPUs across its operations by mid-2027, and put its total AI factory capacity at 132MW, of which 116MW is now contracted to end customers.
Chief executive James Manning framed New Zealand as a launch point for further growth, saying the country’s “established data center infrastructure and future growth potential” gave Sharon AI “a strong foundation for future expansion,” and citing demand from “enterprise, government, hyperscale, AI native and research customers across Asia-Pacific.” The buyer is described only as an AI lab, a direct compute consumer, where Sharon AI’s earlier ESDS anchor was a reseller.
Sharon AI’s second billion-dollar anchor
This is the second billion-dollar contract Sharon AI has signed this year. The first, in April, was a US$1.25 billion deal with India’s ESDS Software Solutions. The New Zealand contract is a little bigger. Sharon AI reported US$1.57 million in revenue in 2025, against five-year contracts now worth more than US$2.5 billion combined.
Sharon AI does not own data centres. It leases space and resells GPU compute, the asset-light model we set out in our NEXTDC’s M3 deep dive. That piece said a second large contract would show neocloud is a real business and not a one-deal story. This is that contract. It caps a busy year: a February Nasdaq listing we covered alongside the Firmus valuation question, a US$350 million Oaktree raise, and Andy Penn joining as chair. Along the way Sharon AI sold out of a data centre in Texas to focus on Australia and Asia-Pacific.
The contract is tied to an oversubscribed US$1.6 billion raise anchored by Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund, and Sharon AI is about to list on the ASX, targeted for the second half of July.
154MW of capacity, 2028 for the flagship build
Sharon AI reported the deal against company-wide totals rather than a New Zealand figure: total AI factory capacity of 132MW, 116MW of it now contracted, and more than 62,000 NVIDIA GPUs targeted across the company by mid-2027. It has not yet broken out the New Zealand share. A contract of this size is counted more in GPUs and dollars than in megawatts. At Sharon AI’s disclosed pricing, US$1.32 billion over five years points to roughly 8,000 to 9,000 high-end GPUs, close to the scale of its earlier ESDS contract and a footprint on the order of 15MW. The value sits in the chips and the compute rather than the floorspace, so a large contract occupies a modest amount of power.
For Sharon AI it is a milestone: the company’s first AI Factory outside Australia, and the first deployment under the Asia-Pacific expansion its US$1.6 billion June raise was designed to fund. For New Zealand it is the largest AI cloud contract disclosed to date, landing in a market that is still early in its build-out. The country has about 154MW of operating colocation capacity across roughly 35 facilities, more than 60% of it in Auckland, and generated 85.5% of its electricity from renewables in 2024, a mix we mapped in our New Zealand data centres spotlight. Its first large AI campus, Datagrid’s 280MW build at Makarewa in Southland, was consented in March 2026 and is due in 2028. Where Sharon AI’s New Zealand capacity will sit, and on what timeline, are among the details still to come.
Provider or project | Capacity (MW) | Status |
New Zealand colocation market | ~154 | Operating, 2026 |
Datagrid, Makarewa (Southland) | 280 consented | Targeting 2028 |
CDC, Auckland | ~80 to 220 | Operating, expanding |
TenPeaks | 130+ | Pipeline |
Source: New Zealand data centres market spotlight; primary company disclosures, July 2026.
There is also a question of firsts. Datagrid has described its Makarewa campus as New Zealand’s first AI factory, and Sharon AI now calls its New Zealand deployment its first AI factory too. The two describe different things: Datagrid is building the campus and the grid connection, while Sharon AI is contracting the compute that runs inside a data hall.
An Australian operator, a New Zealand deployment
Sharon AI is a Sydney company, part of the neocloud tier we track in our neocloud market report, and this contract extends that tier across to New Zealand. It also fits the pattern we have argued will shape the region. The scarce input in AI infrastructure is contracted, sovereign-aligned demand, a thesis we set out in deciding Australia’s AI winners and in our AI compute analysis. Sharon AI has now signed two multi-year anchor contracts while owning almost none of the physical infrastructure, an operator that holds the customer while others build and power the halls. The term AI factory is NVIDIA’s, and the economics behind it are the ones we unpacked after NVIDIA GTC 2026.
What to watch
The disclosures still to come will fill in the New Zealand picture. Watch for the site and its power source, which will show where and how Sharon AI runs the load. Watch for the customer’s identity, which would give investors a read on the contract’s credit quality. Watch the Q1 to Q2 2027 revenue start against the ESDS contract’s Q3 2026 start, the first test of how the backlog converts. And watch the ASX listing, targeted for the second half of July 2026, where local investors will price the contracted book. The site, its power source and the customer are the details still to be disclosed, and revenue begins in 2027.