Australian AI infrastructure company Firmus Technologies and data centre operator CDC Data Centres are ending their partnership on Project Southgate, less than a year after announcing plans to develop up to 1.6GW of AI infrastructure across Australia.
Firmus co-chief executive and co-founder Oliver Curtis told W.Media: “Firmus and CDC mutually agreed earlier this year not to proceed with the previously proposed Southgate development partnership. The decision does not affect Firmus’s current development plans, contracted customer capacity, disclosed strategy or important international partnerships.”
He added: “We remain focused on delivering AI infrastructure projects across our Asia-Pacific portfolio. CDC is a highly respected participant in the Australian data centre sector and we wish them well in their future developments.”
CDC chief executive Greg Boorer told Rampart that the two companies would not proceed with the planned 1.6GW rollout together, a decision also reported by the Australian Financial Review. The partnership has ended well short of its original target, with about 42MW deployed.
Project Southgate was announced in October 2025 by Firmus, CDC and Nvidia as a national rollout of AI factories that was intended to scale to 1.6GW by 2028. Firmus said at the time that the programme could involve up to AU$73.3bn of investment, with CDC providing the underlying data centre infrastructure.
The initial agreement was centred on a CDC site in Melbourne, with about 40MW of capacity identified for the first stage. Infratil, which owns CDC alongside its other shareholders, said at the time that CDC would use its existing and planned Australian data centre footprint to accommodate Firmus’s planned expansion.
According to the AFR, Firmus will continue to occupy a CDC data centre in Melbourne but will no longer expand to the 150MW initially planned for the site. Boorer told Rampart that Firmus had “made other choices regarding doing their own data centre developments, which is slightly different to what we envisaged.”
International plans
The split comes as Firmus has significantly expanded its focus outside Australia. In recent months it has announced AI infrastructure projects and customer agreements in Southeast Asia, including with Meta and OpenAI.
Firmus announced last month that Meta had agreed to take GPU capacity at its AI factories in Southeast Asia, extending a relationship that already includes Meta using Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems at Firmus’s Melbourne facility.
The company has also announced an agreement with OpenAI covering dedicated AI compute capacity at two Malaysian AI factories. Firmus said that deal took its contracted capacity above 900MW.
The change represents a significant shift from the strategy announced when Southgate was launched. At the time, Firmus described the CDC partnership as a way to extend its AI Factory platform from Tasmania into Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Perth, using CDC’s existing and planned data centre footprint.
It also follows a substantial expansion in Firmus’s financing and development plans. The company secured a US$10bn debt facility led by Blackstone, with support from Coatue, in February to fund the next phase of Project Southgate, and subsequently expanded its international development programme.
Boorer also said CDC was misaligned with Firmus on its Australian plans, including its Tasmanian developments, according to the AFR.