The world's biggest company, chipmaker NVIDIA, has announced it is partnering with eight leading Australian companies to build artificial intelligence factories to meet the growing demand for the technology.
NVIDIA said it was partnering with Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, ResetData, Megaport, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk on the project.
They'll operate the AI factories, while NVIDIA will provide the hardware, computing, networking, software and ecosystem support.
The buildout could reach two gigawatts by 2027, NVIDIA said. That's enough to power around 1.5 million homes.
One of the companies, Sharon AI, is deploying up to 68,000 NVIDIA GPUs, a massive number.
"AI factories turn energy into intelligence — the essential resource of the AI economy," said Raj Mirpuri, vice president of global AI clouds and infrastructure ecosystem at NVIDIA.
The partnership will give Australian innovators greater access to accelerated computing and NVIDIA models to develop locally relevant AI applications, NVIDIA said.
Organisations such as Atlassian and Heidi are using NVIDIA's tools to build and customise AI across language, reasoning and speech.
Heidi is a Melbourne-based AI company whose platform is used by doctors to generate clinical notes after its scribe feature listens in on patient consultations.
Combining NVIDIA's technology with Heidi's clinical training and fine-tuning has helped Heidi reason across patient histories, clinical context and guidelines at scale, said Yu Liu, cofounder and chief technology officer of Heidi.
"Australia's established sustainable energy and digital infrastructure, deep technology talent and reputation as a trusted global economic partner provide a strong foundation for startups, universities, researchers, enterprises, developers and AI-native companies to train, deploy and scale AI," NVIDIA said.
