Southgate Melbourne data center, Melbourne, Victoria

Southgate Melbourne is the first deployment of Project Southgate, the Australian AI data center program run by Firmus Technologies with CDC Data Centres and Nvidia, and in March 2026 Firmus signed a multi-billion dollar contract with an unnamed global technology company for about 18,400 Nvidia GB300 GPUs at the Melbourne facility. Firmus called it the second large-scale customer secured for Project Southgate.

Firmus announced the alliance with CDC in October 2025, with an initial investment of A$4.5 billion to be delivered at Southgate Melbourne and a plan to scale to 1.6GW and up to A$73.3 billion across Australia through 2028. At the time, the first stages in Tasmania and Melbourne were under construction, with up to 150MW to be delivered by mid-2026. CDC provides the data center infrastructure, and DCD reported that it was unclear whether CDC would build new facilities or Firmus would take capacity in existing ones. Firmus later said it would place an initial cluster of 18,500 GB300 GPUs live at Southgate Melbourne in the first quarter of 2026, and that Nvidia's DGX Cloud would set up a region there.

The deployments use LiquidCore, CDC's own cooling technology, which the company says does not consume water for primary cooling. Firmus says every stage of Southgate will run on renewable power.

Firmus secured a $10 billion private debt facility led by funds managed by Blackstone, with support from Coatue, in February 2026, w.media reported. In August 2026 it announced a fully subscribed $2 billion equity round from Coatue, Nvidia, Blackstone funds and Jane Street to speed up the Southgate rollout across Australia. In September 2026 Firmus said it had more than 900MW of contracted capacity, with OpenAI signing as an anchor customer for two sites in Malaysia, and that two of its seven AI factories, in Australia and Singapore, are operational.

Firmus is also building a greenfield campus in Tasmania for about 36,800 GB300 GPUs, due to be completed in late 2026.