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Meta Signs On to Lease AI Capacity at Firmus Southeast Asia Data Centers

By: IDCNOVARegion: Southeast Asia
Meta has entered into an agreement to lease AI compute capacity from Australian neocloud provider Firmus' forthcoming data center deployments in Southeast Asia, extending a partnership that already spans the Asia-Pacific region and underscoring the escalating infrastructure demands of frontier AI development.

The deal builds on an existing arrangement under which Meta is already leasing Nvidia GB300 NVL72 compute from Firmus' Melbourne data center. The new Southeast Asian capacity will be based on Nvidia's full-stack DSX platform, according to the companies.

Firmus is currently developing what it describes as "AI factories" across Southeast Asia in collaboration with data center operator DayOne. Among these is a facility in Batam, Indonesia, which is expected to house 170,000 GPUs. The company is also establishing data centers in Malaysia, where OpenAI is set to become a customer. The deployments will integrate Firmus' HyperCube modular data center solution into the facilities. Firmus said in August 2026 that it would acquire the manufacturing business behind HyperCube from Benmax.

Meta's vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Gaya Nagarajan, framed the partnership in strategic terms: "We see Firmus as a long-term strategic infrastructure partner as we build for the next generation of AI across Asia-Pacific and expand the infrastructure supporting our AI research and model development efforts – the foundation of personal superintelligence."

Tim Rosenfield, co-founder and co-CEO of Firmus, emphasized the engineering demands driving the collaboration: "We're building for partners at the forefront of AI, whose models demand exceptional performance and who want to get the most compute from every watt of energy. That's the engineering challenge Firmus was founded to solve. Meta's AI research and model development activities require infrastructure capable of supporting some of the world's most demanding AI workloads. Firmus' AI factory build-out across Asia-Pacific has the scale to support and grow these ambitions."

The agreement comes amid a period of rapid expansion for Firmus. Earlier in September 2026, the company was reported to be exploring an initial public offering that could raise up to $5 billion. Founded in 2019, Firmus initially focused on crypto and high-performance compute with a specialization in immersion cooling, but now positions itself as a pure AI factory builder. Its project pipeline spans Australia — including three sites in Tasmania — as well as Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The Malaysia data centers will be used by OpenAI under a capacity agreement signed earlier in September that brought Firmus' total contracted capacity to more than 900MW.

The deal reflects a broader trend of hyperscale companies securing dedicated AI compute capacity across multiple geographies to support increasingly power-intensive model training and inference workloads. Southeast Asia has emerged as a key battleground for such infrastructure investment, driven by growing demand, relatively competitive energy costs, and proximity to major Asian markets. For Meta, the arrangement with Firmus adds a modular, scalable capacity source as it pursues what it calls personal superintelligence — a long-term AI research agenda requiring substantial and geographically diversified compute resources.