Australian AI cloud and data center firm Firmus is planning more developments in Tasmania.

First reported by local press, including ABC, Pulse Tasmania, and others, Firmus is looking to develop a campus in Bell Bay and is exploring potential for another in Wesley Vale.

A development application has been filed with the George Town council for the development at Bell Bay.

The company lists the George Town project on its website, saying it wants to build an ‘AI factory’ at Lot 1 East Tamar Highway, Long Reach, on the former proposed Gunns Pulp Mill site.

“We plan to construct two purpose-built AI data hall buildings, an office building, and a maintenance workshop, all within the existing cleared industrial platform,” the company says.

The George Town site – listed as Project GEE01 and the Long Reach Data Centre – will draw approximately 288MW and utilize direct-to-chip liquid cooling. The site already has three 220kV high-voltage power lines running through it, operated by TasNetworks.

The vacant land was previously earmarked for the Gunns pulp mill project. First authorized in 2007, the AU$2bn (US$1.4bn) project never came to fruition. Forestry firm Gunns was liquidated in 2013, with its assets bought by New Forests.

Full details of Firmus’ plans in Wesley Vale have not been shared. The company told local press it continued to assess potential sites in Tasmania, including in the George Town and Wesley Vale regions, as part of its long-term growth plans.

Project Southgate is a long-term initiative to design and deploy sovereign compute in Australia for AI training and inference, according to the company, with plans to deploy 1.6GW of capacity through to 2028.

Founded in 2019, Firmus was initially focused on crypto and high-performance compute, specializing in immersion cooling, but today describes itself as a pure AI factory builder.

The company uses its HyperCube, a proprietary electrical and cooling system, claiming the system uses liquid cooling to remove heat more efficiently than traditional air-based systems.

The Nvidia-backed company has a small existing facility in Tasmania but is developing a 90MW data center in Launceston as part of Project Southgate. That project is reportedly scalable to nearly 400MW.

The company has previously outlined plans for a greenfield AI Factory campus in Tasmania that will host approximately 36,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and go live in late 2026.

The company has an immersion-cooled GPU deployment in an STT GDC facility in Singapore through its SMC cloud unit.

It is partnering with CDC to roll out capacity on the mainland. The company lists planned Project Southgate locations on the mainland in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. The company was set to start with 18,500 Nvidia GB300 GPUs hosted in Melbourne this year.

The company is also funding a subsea cable linking Tasmania with the Australian mainland.