Firmus Technologies partners with VAST Data

Firmus Technologies Group, an AI infrastructure specialist founded in Australia with operations across Asia Pacific, has selected VAST Data's VAST AI Operating System as a foundational data layer for its next generation of sovereign, energy-efficient 'AI factories'.

Firmus, an NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP), is building large-scale AI infrastructure designed to maximise performance per watt, supporting advanced AI training and inference workloads while aiming to minimise environmental impact.

The collaboration with VAST forms part of Firmus’ infrastructure strategy built on the NCP 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.

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 will enable 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 from AI training to inference and beyond as accelerated computing continues to evolve.

“When you’re designing AI factories to operate across tens or hundreds of thousands of GPUs, energy, data movement, and compute efficiency become inseparable," said Jeff Denworth, co-founder at VAST Data.

"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.”

"The data layer has to scale in lockstep with compute and energy. At the scale of thousands of GPUs, small inefficiencies compound quickly," said Daniel Kearney, CTO at Firmus.

"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 recently secured a US$10 billion (AU$14.2 billion) debt financing facility led by Blackstone, after having previously received an equity investment from Maas Group Holdings earlier this month, raising $500 million in November and $330 million in September.