How does Sharon AI pay for 56,000 NVIDIA GPUs?

It does not buy them outright. Sharon AI uses a mix of investor capital and outside funding, and crucially, NVIDIA helps fund the purchase through credit support in exchange for a share of the cloud revenue the chips earn. This lets a company much smaller than the multi-billion-dollar hardware bill commit to a large GPU fleet, because it does not have to pay for everything upfront from its own balance sheet.

Is the Sharon AI NVIDIA deal worth US$4.88 billion in spending?

No. The US$4.88 billion figure is the value of the cloud services over the six-year deal, which is what the arrangement could earn. The cost of buying the chips is a separate number, well over US$2 billion. The two are often confused, but one is revenue over time and the other is upfront capital cost.

How is Sharon AI different from IREN and Firmus?

All three are Australian-founded neoclouds using similar financing, but they differ on where they build. IREN runs its AI halls in the United States and Canada, with Australian operations targeted from 2028. Firmus is building 1.6GW across Australian sites by 2028. Sharon AI is deploying its 132MW inside Australian data centres now, which keeps the compute and the sovereignty case on home soil.

How Sharon AI funds 56,000 NVIDIA GPUs | Australia Data Centre Index

At a glance

Sharon AI (NASDAQ:SHAZ) is deploying up to 40,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs under its six-year collaboration with NVIDIA, taking its AI capacity to 132MW, with 102MW already contracted to customers.
The chips cost well over US$2 billion. Sharon AI is far smaller than that bill, so it does not buy them outright.
NVIDIA and lenders fund much of the hardware in return for a share of the revenue it earns, the model used across the global neocloud sector from CoreWeave to Australian-founded IREN.
The headline US$4.88 billion attached to the deal is the value of cloud services over six years, not the cost of the chips. They are different numbers.

What Sharon AI is building

Sharon AI is a neocloud company that buys large fleets of NVIDIA chips, installs them in data centres, and rents the computing power to businesses, startups and researchers. Its collaboration with NVIDIA, announced on 12 June 2026, lifts planned capacity to 132MW and tens of thousands of GPUs.

The hardware bill dwarfs the company. The chips alone cost well over US$2 billion, several times Sharon AI’s size, so they are never bought outright. How that spend gets funded is the substance of the deal, and it follows a template now well established overseas.

How the buildout gets funded

Neoclouds do not pay cash for their chips. Vendors, lenders and investors fund the hardware in exchange for a share of what it earns.

NVIDIA’s involvement is the clearest example. It backs Sharon AI’s commitment with credit support and takes a share of the cloud revenue the chips generate, on top of selling the hardware. Sharon AI avoids pre-funding the whole bill from its own balance sheet, and NVIDIA earns more only when the chips are well used. We set out the mechanics in our coverage of the deal.

Vendor support is one structure among several. The global neocloud sector has built a menu of ways to fund GPUs, and most large operators use more than one.

NEOCLOUD FINANCING STRUCTURES

STRUCTURE	IN PLAIN TERMS	WHO USES IT
Vendor support	The chip maker helps fund the purchase and shares the revenue	NVIDIA with Sharon AI, CoreWeave, Nebius and IREN
GPU-backed loans	Borrow against the chips themselves as collateral	CoreWeave and most large neoclouds
Customer contracts as security	Long-term rental contracts are pledged to raise the debt	CoreWeave’s deals with Microsoft and OpenAI
Separate funding vehicles	The chips and debt are held in a standalone company, off the parent’s books	Meta and xAI, at tens of billions of dollars

Source: Primary disclosures and Financial Times reporting, June 2026.

The scale of this is hard to overstate. Roughly US$120 billion of AI infrastructure debt now sits in these separate vehicles worldwide. Australia is in the picture as a financier too, not just an operator: Macquarie is among the lenders backing global neoclouds, and Firmus is built on a US$10 billion facility from Blackstone and Coatue.

Sharon AI is now adding the investor leg. The Australian Financial Review reported on 14 June 2026 that it has hired Goldman Sachs to raise about $1 billion through a combination of new shares and convertible debt, sold privately to institutional investors, to fund the NVIDIA buildout. Sharon AI is capitalised at about US$1 billion, which makes the raise roughly the size of the whole company. The terms had been sent to investors, and the raising had not been announced publicly at the time of writing.

The financing model is not new for Australian-founded operators, and Sharon AI is not the only one building at home. Firmus is developing 1.6GW across five Australian sites, and ResetData runs sovereign capacity domestically. The real divide is between those building in Australia and IREN, the largest Australian-founded neocloud, which runs its halls offshore.

AUSTRALIAN-FOUNDED NEOCLOUDS

OPERATOR	BASED IN	WHERE IT BUILDS
Sharon AI	Australia	Australian data centres
IREN	Sydney	Texas and British Columbia, Australia from 2028
Firmus	Australia	Project Southgate, 1.6GW across five Australian sites by 2028

IREN, Sydney-headquartered and one of the larger players globally, runs its AI halls in the United States and Canada, scaling on its own multi-billion-dollar NVIDIA neocloud deal. Much of the Australian-founded neocloud capacity built so far has been built abroad, for offshore customers. Sharon AI’s 132MW is going into exisiting Australian data centres, anchored by its cluster at NEXTDC’s M3 facility in Melbourne, with 102MW already contracted to customers.

Power is the real constraint

Financing solves whether the chips can be bought. It does nothing for the harder problem, which is getting them powered and switched on.

A chip order ships in months. A data centre takes three to five years to build, and in Australia, connecting it to the grid alone can take around two years, on AEMO’s own pipeline numbers. With 102MW of Sharon AI’s 132MW already contracted, customer demand is clearly there. What would speed Australia’s AI buildout is not more money chasing the sector, which is plentiful, but faster grid connections and firmer power.

What to watch

The reported Goldman Sachs raising is the first thing to watch. The AFR put pricing as soon as 17 June, with the ASX debut expected in July, and formal terms would confirm how the chips get paid for. Beyond that, Sharon AI has not named the sites for its new capacity, and its next quarterly results and ASX listing documents are where the site detail and build timing should appear.