VAST Data today announced that Firmus Technologies Group, an AI infrastructure specialist founded in Australia with operations across Asia Pacific, has selected the VAST AI Operating System as a foundational data layer for its next generation of sovereign, energy-efficient AI factories.
Firmus, a NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP), is building large-scale AI infrastructure designed to maximise performance per watt, supporting advanced AI training and inference workloads while minimising environmental impact. The collaboration with VAST forms part of Firmus’ infrastructure strategy built on the NVIDIA Cloud Partner reference design, enabling both anchor tenant and government-backed workloads as the company scales AI capacity across Australia, Singapore, and the broader Asia-Pacific region.
With active AI factory deployments operating at the scale of thousands of GPUs today, and a roadmap designed to expand ultimately to hundreds of thousands of GPUs across Asia-Pacific, Firmus is architecting its platforms for sustained, multi-generational growth. These environments are designed to support large-scale training, fine-tuning, and inference workflows, where data volumes are expected to reach petabyte scale and infrastructure efficiency is critical to long-term viability.
This regional expansion includes flagship AI factory developments such as Project Southgate in Tasmania, a large-scale, renewable-powered deployment designed to support sovereign AI workloads and demonstrate how AI infrastructure can scale efficiently under real-world energy constraints.
“Firmus was founded on the belief that AI infrastructure must be engineered as a single, vertically integrated system,” said Daniel Kearney, Chief Technology Officer at Firmus. “Our Model-to-Grid architecture integrates model behaviour, GPU performance, thermal dynamics, and grid conditions into one optimisation framework, making our AI factories both model-aware and grid-aware, with real-time responsiveness to energy pricing and broader grid signals. The data layer has to scale in lockstep with compute and energy. At the scale of thousands of GPUs, small inefficiencies compound quickly. We selected the VAST AI Operating System because it is architected for that reality: high throughput, disaggregated, aligned with NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) reference design environments, and built to sustain GPU efficiency as we expand sovereign AI capacity.”
Firmus was founded to rethink how AI infrastructure is designed, deployed, and operated; from power and cooling through to data movement and orchestration. As GPU architectures advance on increasingly compressed timelines, the company’s AI factory model aligns compute, networking, cooling, and storage as a single system, enabling each layer to evolve and scale independently without introducing bottlenecks or requiring architectural rework.
Sovereign AI is a core pillar of this approach. Firmus’ roadmap includes in-country deployments designed to support public-sector and regulated workloads, ensure data remains under local control, and align AI infrastructure with regional energy and sustainability priorities. Australia represents a strategically important anchor market within this broader Asia-Pacific strategy, offering renewable energy resources and large-scale expansion opportunities alongside Firmus’ established presence in Singapore and other regional hubs.
As Firmus scales its AI factory environments built on the NCP reference design and next-generation GPU platforms, it requires a data foundation capable of operating reliably at extreme throughput and capacity. The VAST AI Operating System was selected to provide a unified data layer that sustains GPU efficiency across large, disaggregated clusters, as model sizes, datasets, and workload complexity increase.
VAST enables Firmus to unify data access across AI factory environments, support secure multi-tenant workloads, and establish a long-term foundation for expanding sovereign AI capacity across Asia Pacific. As Firmus continues to scale its regional infrastructure footprint, the VAST AI Operating System will underpin the data layer required to move seamlessly from AI training to inference and beyond as accelerated computing continues to evolve.
“At this scale, eliminating inefficiency isn’t a rounding error, it’s the business model,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “When you’re designing AI factories to operate across tens or hundreds of thousands of GPUs, energy, data movement, and compute efficiency become inseparable. Firmus understands that the economics of AI are defined by how efficiently data flows through the system per watt of power consumed. The VAST AI OS was built for exactly that reality: sustaining GPU efficiency, eliminating bottlenecks, and enabling large, disaggregated AI systems to operate as a single, coherent platform.”
