Australian technology firm Sharon AI has secured a $1.8 billion data centre deal, leading to its share price skyrocketing on Wall Street overnight.
The deal will see the company install thousands of high-performance AI chipsets into Sydney and Melbourne data centres, leading to greater compute power for those centres.
The company will install roughly 8,200 NVIDIA chips in NEXTDC data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, alongside 17.8 petabytes of storage.
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The company does not build data centres but installs equipment into existing centres and is what is known as a “neocloud” firm.
After announcing the deal on Wednesday US time, Sharon AI shares rose 21.5 per cent, leading to its valuation growing to US$440 million, roughly A$657 million.
The company is looking to go public in Australia before 1 July, following major success, tripling revenue to US$1.57 million (roughly A$2.28 million) this year.
AI isn’t good for all Australian businesses
This closely follows Atlassian’s share price dropping 8.4 per cent amid concerns regarding the loss of more desk roles as Anthropic and Amazon continue their partnered development of next-generation AI.
The latest drop came as Amazon Web Services (AWS) revealed its development of a new agentic AI for business development and sales.
Prior to this, Anthropic’s developments with Claude saw a number of software firms suffer, including Atlassian, when the AI giant announced new plugins for its Claude Cowork platform that would allow the agentic AI platform to be further tailored for performing specific tasks on user devices.
Over the past year, this has led to a total share price slump of 70 per cent for Atlassian. Together, Mike Cannon-Brookes and former chief executive and co-founder Scott Farquhar have lost a joint total of $35 billion just this year, causing both to slip out of the top 10 richest people in the country.
Still, Cannon-Brookes remains bullish about AI, having terminated thousands of positions over the last year, with the latest 1,600 being axed just last month, all with the intention of increasing AI investment.
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Daniel Croft
Born in the heart of Western Sydney, Daniel Croft is a passionate journalist with an understanding for and experience writing in the technology space. Having studied at Macquarie University, he joined Momentum Media in 2022, writing across a number of publications including Australian Aviation, Cyber Security Connect and Defence Connect. Outside of writing, Daniel has a keen interest in music, and spends his time playing in bands around Sydney.