Macquarie Data Centres has partnered with Dell to deploy Nvidia hardware across Australia in support of sovereign AI workloads.

The agreement will see Dell host its so-called ‘AI Factory’ within Macquarie’s AI and cloud data centers, with the company’s IC3 Super West data center, currently under construction in Sydney, acting as the anchor facility.

In a statement, the two companies said the ‘AI Factories’ will power both enterprise and private AI, in addition to neocloud projects, “while achieving the highest standards of data security within sovereign data centers.” They said the solution was especially significant for critical infrastructure providers and highly regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, education, and research, given their strict regulatory compliance conditions regarding data storage and processing.

Previously described by Dell as a "portfolio of products, solutions, and services tailored for AI workloads - from desktop to data center to cloud,” its Nvidia-powered ‘AI Factory’ combines Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers with Nvidia GPUs, the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet platform, Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs, and the Dell PowerScale F710 storage.

“For Australia's AI-driven future to be secure, we must ensure that Australian data centres play a core role in AI, data, infrastructure, and operations,” said David Hirst, CEO, Macquarie Data Centres. “Our collaboration with Dell Technologies delivers just that, the perfect marriage of global tech and sovereign infrastructure.”

Jamie Humphrey, Dell's general manager for Australia and New Zealand, added that the companies "are enabling organizations to develop and deploy AI as a transformative and competitive advantage in Australia in a way that is secure, sovereign, and scalable.”

Macquarie first announced plans to build IC3 Super West in January 2024, with the facility set to be the third and largest data center on the Macquarie Park Data Centre Campus in Sydney's North Zone. Expected to be completed by mid-2026, the 47MW data center has been “purpose-built for the scale, power, and cooling demands of AI infrastructure today and into the future,” Macquarie said.

IC3 Super West will be the last data center built by Macquarie on its Sydney North Zone campus, with the company now seeking other new sites in the city for growth.