Meta has signed an agreement to lease AI compute capacity from Australian neocloud Firmus across its upcoming Southeast Asia data centers, building on an existing deal in which Meta leases Nvidia GB300 NVL72 compute from Firmus' Melbourne facility. Firmus is co-developing AI factories in the region with operator DayOne, including a Batam, Indonesia site expected to house 170,000 GPUs, and additional facilities in Malaysia where OpenAI is also a customer. The Southeast Asia capacity delivered to Meta will run on Nvidia's full-stack DSX platform, with Firmus' HyperCube modular data center solution integrated into the facilities. Firmus co-founder and co-CEO Tim Rosenfield said the build-out has the scale to support Meta's AI research and model development workloads, and the company's total contracted capacity now exceeds 900MW.
The deal signals that major AI developers are looking beyond hyperscale self-build strategies and committing to long-term capacity agreements with specialist neocloud operators at significant scale, with Firmus's 900MW-plus contracted portfolio spanning multiple Asia-Pacific markets. A planned IPO targeting up to $5 billion would make Firmus one of the largest public market tests for the pure AI factory builder model, setting a potential benchmark for how investors value contracted GPU capacity businesses.
Meta's partnership with Firmus for AI compute capacity in Southeast Asia signals a major hyperscaler expanding regional infrastructure, a high-impact story involving a named Fortune 500 company and a named operator in a fast-growing market.