18,400 to 18,500 Nvidia GB300 GPUs. That is the hardware count for Project Southgate, a single AI factory being built in Melbourne. The number is the story.
It is not vague ambition. It is a specific, contracted floor for compute power, set to begin rolling out in 2026.
The company doing the building, Firmus Technologies, started in 2019. Its first business was Bitcoin mining rigs. Co-founder Oliver Curtis ran that operation.
The two worlds — crypto mining and AI computing — share a single brutal constraint: the electricity bill. Both need vast power.
Both die if the power costs too much. That is the thread Firmus is pulling. The deal places Firmus inside Nvidia’s DGX Cloud Lepton marketplace as a Cloud Partner.
What that means in practice is access. Smaller developers and independent researchers can now rent GPU clusters in Singapore and Australia through Nvidia’s platform. Before this, that kind of compute was locked inside tech giants and well-funded university labs.
Now it is a marketplace product. Firmus is not the first company to make the jump from crypto to AI.
Others have done it. But the scale of Project Southgate is different. The flagship site at Southgate Melbourne will house nearly 18,500 GPUs.
That is not a pilot program. That is an infrastructure bet.
The partnership has three names on it: Firmus Technologies, Nvidia, and CDC Data Centres. They are calling it Project Southgate. The facility itself is being described as an AI factory — a term that once described Bitcoin mining warehouses and now describes buildings where algorithms train on data.
The energy efficiency angle is central. Firmus built its later reputation on energy-efficient AI data centers, a direct evolution from the energy-hungry mining world Curtis knew firsthand. For the Australian tech sector, this is a concrete number to point at. 18,400 GPUs.
A 2026 rollout. A unified accelerated computing platform that opens the door for smaller players.
The deal does not change the global AI landscape overnight. But it changes the local one. It puts a specific, measurable piece of infrastructure into the pipeline.
The broader logic is simple. The infrastructure built for digital gold — the warehouses, the cooling systems, the power contracts, the GPU stacks — can be repurposed for algorithms that reshape medicine and logistics.
The hardware does not care what it computes. What matters is the electricity and the price of the chips. Firmus is betting that the same discipline that kept Bitcoin mining profitable will keep AI computing accessible.
Project Southgate is the proof point. 18,500 GPUs. Two years out. Three companies.
One building. That is the hard number behind the press release.
Everything else is speculation.
