Meta has signed on to lease AI compute capacity from Aussie neocloud Firmus' upcoming data center deployments in Southeast Asia.

The agreement builds on an existing partnership, in which Meta is leasing Nvidia GB300 NVL72 compute from Firmus' Melbourne data center.

Firmus is currently developing so-called "AI factories" in Southeast Asia with data center operator DayOne, including one in Batam, Indonesia, which is expected to house 170,000 GPUs. The company is also establishing data centers in Malaysia, of which OpenAI is set to be a customer.

The deployments will see Firmus' HyperCube modular data center solution integrated into the facilities. The company said in August 2026 that it would be acquiring the manufacturing business behind HyperCube from Benmax.

The compute capacity in Southeast Asia set to be delivered to Meta will be based on Nvidia's full-stack DSX platform.

Meta's vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Gaya Nagarajan, said: "We see Firmus as a long-term strategic infrastructure partner as we build for the next generation of AI across Asia-Pacific and expand the infrastructure supporting our AI research and model development efforts – the foundation of personal superintelligence."

Tim Rosenfield, co-founder and co-CEO of Firmus, added: “We’re building for partners at the forefront of AI, whose models demand exceptional performance and who want to get the most compute from every watt of energy. That’s the engineering challenge Firmus was founded to solve.

“Meta’s AI research and model development activities require infrastructure capable of supporting some of the world’s most demanding AI workloads. Firmus’ AI factory build-out across Asia-Pacific has the scale to support and grow these ambitions.”

Earlier this month, Firmus was reported to be looking to raise up to $5 billion in an initial public offering (IPO).

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.

It has projects under development in Australia, including in Tasmania (x3), as well as across Asia, in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The Malaysia data centers will be used by OpenAI, with the two companies signing a capacity agreement earlier this month that brings Firmus' total contracted capacity to more than 900MW.