Nvidia backs a 170,000-GPU cluster in Batam
Firmus and DayOne target a 2027 go-live in Indonesia.
AI start-up Firmus Technologies is working to deploy a massive 170,000-GPU Nvidia cluster in a Batam data centre. As reported by Bloomberg on Monday, the Indonesia campus will ultimately offer 360MW of capacity.
It's a big number for a young company, and it sits inside an even bigger story about how Nvidia is choosing to spread its chips around the world. Here's what's happening.
The deal
Firmus and DayOne will develop the AI data centre, which will be a multi-tenant project for AI-native customers. The facility is set to go live in the first quarter of 2027.
Specifically, Firmus will be able to access Nvidia systems for its customers through a revenue-sharing and credit support agreement. That arrangement covers as many as 170,000 GPUs through 2027 and 2028. According to co-chief executive Tim Rosenfield, Firmus expects to bring in US$25 billion to US$30 billion from committed offtake agreements during the first six years of the Nvidia partnership.
Who is Firmus
Firmus began as a Bitcoin mining operation in the Australian state of Tasmania in 2019. That gave the firm the chance to develop its proprietary immersion cooling technology in its own data centre.
The technology went on to power Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC), its AI GPU cloud platform operated in partnership with STT GDC. SMC currently runs a Singapore cloud region across two data centres. I visited STT Singapore 6 in February 2026 at Tim's invitation, where I caught my first glimpse of its unique immersion cooling system, which uses interconnected tanks powered by just one pump.
What's happening
This deal, with Nvidia effectively buying up data centre capacity, is probably confusing to some. Put simply, Nvidia has been bootstrapping AI adoption by underwriting the deployment of some AI data centres. It does this in two ways: directly leasing data centre capacity, and signing offtake deals with neoclouds.
SemiAnalysis' Daniel Nishball spoke on this at the w.media HPC Summit last week, noting that Nvidia is increasingly doing it overseas and with smaller, more upstart neoclouds to seed the ecosystem. These Cloud Service Agreements, detailed in Nvidia's financial filings as obligations to cloud services, effectively make it the central bank of AI.
Of course, the Firmus deal is hardly small. And I suppose I'll now consider the mystery of the 260MW Indonesia data centre that Jensen Huang mentioned at Computex 2025 to be solved.
