Australian neocloud Sharon AI secures $950M AI infrastructure deal amid sovereign AI boom

Sharon AI will achieve cloud solution deployment in Australia at NEXTDC data centers, returning revenue starting late 2026.

“We are thrilled to continue to expand our AI Cloud business, building and deploying the latest cloud computing infrastructure in Australia with NEXTDC and Vast Data,” says James Manning, co-founder and CEO, Sharon AI. “This contract follows on from our previously announced agreements in the region, and our customer pipeline continues to grow. We continue to see strong demand across enterprise, hyperscale, research and AI native sectors throughout Australia and Asia-Pacific.”

The solutions will employ the Vast Data AI Operating System as a new way for organizations to more efficiently run their workloads.

The announcement highlights how emerging GPU cloud providers are positioning themselves as localized alternatives to hyperscalers by deploying sovereign AI infrastructure close to enterprise and research demand, particularly in Asia-Pacific. Sharon AI’s alignment with NEXTDC and VAST Data also reflects a broader market trend where AI-native infrastructure stacks combining colocation, accelerated compute, and AI-optimized storage software are becoming tightly integrated solutions. 

Strategically, the deal underscores growing enterprise appetite for dedicated AI cloud capacity in Australia amid concerns around data sovereignty, latency, and GPU availability, while reinforcing the rise of neoclouds as an increasingly important layer in the evolving AI infrastructure ecosystem. This aligns with broader industry trends around AI-driven infrastructure expansion and the emergence of neocloud providers as a distinct market category.

Sharon AI and Cisco jointly with NVIDIA, recently opened Australia’s first Cisco Secure AI Factory for secure, high-performance AI infrastructure.

Article Topics

AI infrastructure  |  cloud infrastructure  |  Sovereign Infrastructure