Product2 publishers3 min readPublished
Firmus sells OpenAI the grid connection Stargate Korea still cannot find
Two Malaysian sites take Firmus past 900MW of contracted capacity, though five of its seven data centres are still unbuilt, which puts the scarce input in this trade on the grid side rather than the silicon side.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- OpenAI has signed a multi-year capacity agreement with Firmus, contracting compute from two Firmus data centre locations in Malaysia and taking the role of anchor customer at both.
- Firmus says the OpenAI agreement lifts its total contracted capacity across all customers to more than 900MW.
- The company counts seven AI data centres across Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, of which five are still under development and expected to be ready for service within 24 months.
- The sites will run Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems on Nvidia's DSX AI Factory Platform, integrated into Firmus's prefabricated HyperCube modules.
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Why it matters
- constraint The binding input in these deals is a site that can be powered and cooled, so American compute demand routes to whichever jurisdiction can clear a substation rather than whichever can buy accelerators.
- decision A buyer contracting from a site still in development is buying a delivery date, and the schedule risk lands on its own product plans rather than on the operator's balance sheet.
- exposure OpenAI's regional serving footprint now sits in a country Washington has already warned over export controls, which puts a licensing decision made in Washington inside the dependency chain.
- capability The Australian capability being built and exported here is heavy prefabrication in regional New South Wales, not model development, which is a different industrial base than the announcement language implies.
In South Korea, OpenAI has held a letter of intent with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix since last October and still has no ground under it. Korea JoongAng Daily reports, citing unnamed sources, that the parties cannot acquire a site able to accommodate the power and water the two data centres would need [11]. SK Telecom says nothing has progressed since the LOIs were signed, and OpenAI's only comment was that the domestic project is "still under discussion" [12]. Silicon is not the constraint in that account.
That is the value of what Firmus is selling. The Malaysian sites had not been publicly disclosed before this week [13], and TNW's reading of the arrangement is that Malaysia supplies land, grid connection and power while the tokens produced there serve OpenAI users worldwide [7]. The HyperCubes are prefabricated in regional New South Wales, combining liquid cooling, mechanical systems and electrification [6], so the Australian contribution that actually crosses a border is a manufactured module. Tim Rosenfield, Firmus co-founder and co-CEO, called the deal the moment Asia-Pacific becomes a producer of intelligence rather than a consumer of it [8]. OpenAI's Sachin Katti described the same sites as helping serve growing demand for OpenAI's products across the region and around the world [9]. Katti's sentence describes who owns the output, while Rosenfield's describes the address.
For scale on what is still to be built, Firmus's Batam campus in Indonesia is 360MW with a first-quarter 2027 target and expected offtake of $25bn to $30bn over six years [15]. That one campus equals 40 percent of the 900MW being announced [16], and the offtake range divides out to roughly $12m to $14m of revenue per contracted megawatt per year [17]. On that arithmetic a signed megawatt is worth a great deal inside a document, which is why the calendar is worth reading: the Australian Financial Review reports that Firmus has instructed bankers, is working on a pathfinder prospectus and is arranging investor meetings for next week, with no ASX timeline but an accelerated path [14].
Teams in this position describe themselves as procuring compute, when what they are actually procuring is a delivery date on a substation. The sorting question for a capacity contract has two parts: is the site and its power secured, and is the silicon and the offtake secured. Stargate Korea holds the second and is stuck on the first [11]. Firmus claims both in Malaysia, and until the sites energise, the claim rests on paper.
The residual risk is jurisdictional rather than technical. TNW reported the same day that Malaysia is weighing Huawei chips for a sovereign AI project, and that Washington has warned it about US export controls [18]; Armenia's AI factory, the same piece notes, exists because Washington signed a licence [19]. Taking both sides is comfortable for Malaysia. For OpenAI it means regional serving capacity that is only as durable as the export licence sitting under the Nvidia hardware.
What to watch
- Whether the pathfinder prospectus turns into an ASX listing, and at what valuation against the $10.5bn Firmus carried in August.
- Whether any of the five sites under development reach service inside the 24 month window Firmus has given itself.
- Whether Washington's export-control warning to Malaysia turns into licence conditions attached to the Nvidia systems in these sites.