Firmus, Nvidia team on 360MW Indonesia AI campus

Firmus Technologies has teamed with Nvidia on a 360-megawatt AI campus in Batam, its first data-centre project in Indonesia. Bloomberg reported the site, being developed with Singapore-based DayOne, is due to start operations in the first quarter of 2027 and could support $US25 billion to $US30 billion, or about $38.4 billion to $46.1 billion, in committed offtake over six years.

Batam changes the read on Firmus’s regional plan. The Australian company has spent recent months promoting Project Southgate at home. This deal shows it is also trying to secure scale offshore, with Nvidia attached, instead of waiting for every domestic transmission constraint to clear.

In its earlier Southgate expansion announcement, Firmus chair Oliver Curtis described the Australian pipeline as sovereign AI infrastructure. The Indonesian project does not walk that back. It gives Firmus another route: a large offshore campus with named partners, a published timeline and a power pathway that is already more concrete than many domestic proposals.

The agreement may cover as many as 170,000 Nvidia AI accelerator chips, Bloomberg said. Chief executive Tim Rosenfield told the outlet the company was building from customer demand already in hand.

We’re building our business based on demand that we’re seeing from customers and contracts that we’re closing.

Tim Rosenfield, to Bloomberg

Rosenfield also told Bloomberg that funding and capital remained strong. In a capital-heavy AI campus, customer contracts and financing have to arrive well before the first racks go live.

Why Batam matters

The electricity story is unusually specific. In April, DayOne said it had signed Indonesia’s largest 511MVA, or about 450MW, power purchase agreement with PLN Batam and BP Batam to expand its hyperscale data-centre platform on the island. That sits close to the 360MW campus size outlined by Bloomberg, making the site look less like a speculative land play and more like a project with an electricity path already mapped. The scale matters because AI campuses need both chips and firm power before customers commit.

The Jakarta Post reported in April that BP Batam and state utility PLN were backing the city’s second hyperscale data-centre project. Local authorities have pitched Batam as a low-latency, power-ready site for regional cloud and AI workloads. That is a cleaner infrastructure story than many greenfield Australian AI campus proposals can offer.

For Firmus, the deal broadens its Nvidia relationship from an Australian build-out ambition to deployable regional infrastructure. The Australian Financial Review argued the Indonesia plan sharpened the commercial case for a wider rollout. The company can now point to an identified campus, a development partner and a power agreement already announced on the ground.

Execution risk remains. Bloomberg’s timeline depends on construction, customer ramp-up and Firmus turning early contracts into durable utilisation once the first capacity switches on in 2027. For Australia’s AI infrastructure sector, the move is still notable: one of its more ambitious startups is no longer framing growth only around what the local grid might allow. It is trying to secure Nvidia-backed capacity in Southeast Asia now, then use that offshore footprint to strengthen its hand at home.