APAC neocloud Firmus Technologies has selected the Vast Data AI OS for its AI cloud platform.

Firmus will use Vast's OS as the foundational data layer for its sovereign AI factories, operating in Australia and the wider Asia Pacific region.

“Firmus was founded on the belief that AI infrastructure must be engineered as a single, vertically integrated system,” said Daniel Kearney, CTO at Firmus. “Our Model-to-Grid architecture integrates model behaviour, GPU performance, thermal dynamics, and grid conditions into one optimisation framework, making our AI factories both model-aware and grid-aware, with real-time responsiveness to energy pricing and broader grid signals."

"The data layer has to scale in lockstep with compute and energy. At the scale of thousands of GPUs, small inefficiencies compound quickly. We selected the Vast AI Operating System because it is architected for that reality: high throughput, disaggregated, aligned with Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP) reference design environments, and built to sustain GPU efficiency as we expand sovereign AI capacity.”

“At this scale, eliminating inefficiency isn’t a rounding error, it’s the business model,” added Jeff Denworth, co-founder at Vast Data. “When you’re designing AI factories to operate across tens or hundreds of thousands of GPUs, energy, data movement, and compute efficiency become inseparable. Firmus understands that the economics of AI are defined by how efficiently data flows through the system per watt of power consumed. The Vast AI OS was built for exactly that reality: sustaining GPU efficiency, eliminating bottlenecks, and enabling large, disaggregated AI systems to operate as a single, coherent platform.”

Firmus currently operates a fleet of GPUs in the "thousands," though it aims to scale to hundreds of thousands of GPUs across multiple different locations. The hardware will be offered for large-scale training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads.

Within this is Firmus' Project Southgate, a large-scale and green-energy powered AI cluster under development in Tasmania. The company secured $10 billion in debt financing to support the project earlier this month.

Firmus first used the term ‘Project Southgate’ in September last year to describe an “AI factory” campus in Launceston, Tasmania. At the time, Firmus said the project, which it worked on in partnership with the Tasmanian Government, would deliver a combined 90MW of AI infrastructure by 2026.

Just a month later, Firmus announced a planned expansion into mainland Australia in partnership with CDC Data Centres under the Project Southgate moniker, which it began publicly terming as a wider initiative. The company said this partnership would extend its capacity to 1.6GW, and announced additional deployments in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth

Firmus is one of many neoclouds to have partnered with Vast Data. The company also counts as its customers the likes of CoreWeave, Nscale, Buzz HPC, Fluidstack, GMI Cloud, Akamai Technologies, and Crusoe.