Hot on the heels of its ASX debut, SCX.ai has struck a landmark partnership with global AI data intelligence specialist DDNPartnership will expand Australia’s largest sovereign AI inferencing cloud, combining SCX.ai’s ASIC-accelerated infrastructure with DDN’s Infinia data intelligence platformSCX.ai enters market with $6.5m in contracted annual recurring revenue and more than 400 active users, with its second sovereign AI node targeted by year-end
Special report:** Fresh from its ASX debut, SCX.ai has struck a strategic partnership with global AI data intelligence leader DDN to expand Australia’s largest sovereign AI inferencing cloud.**
The partnership follows SCX.ai’s ASX listing on August 21 after a fully underwritten $40 million IPO, which saw it become Australia’s first ASX-listed pure-play sovereign AI inference infrastructure company.
Just days later, SCX.ai (ASX:SCX) is moving to scale the infrastructure underpinning its Australian-based AI cloud, which allows enterprises, government agencies and research institutions to run sophisticated AI models while keeping sensitive data and workloads onshore.
The partnership brings together SCX.ai’s purpose-built ASIC-accelerated infrastructure with DDN’s Infinia data intelligence platform, designed to increase AI performance, lower the cost per token and support significantly greater volumes of concurrent AI workloads.
This partnership will help develop a reference architecture between DDN’s Infinia and SCX’s Sambanova ASIC chips.
It builds on the successful launch of SCX.ai’s first sovereign AI node at the Equinix SY5 data centre in Sydney, where the integration of DDN Infinia will help ensure the underlying data layer can keep pace with increasingly data-intensive AI workloads.
“For the first time, Australian organisations have access to a fully domestic, enterprise-grade AI cloud that scales effortlessly,” SCX.ai founder and CEO David Keane said.
“By integrating DDN’s world-class data platforms into our architecture, we are ensuring that our infrastructure can handle the most data-intensive workloads on the planet.
“This partnership supercharges our mission to deliver advanced AI entirely onshore, without compromising speed, security or sovereignty.”
Removing the AI data bottleneck
As organisations deploy larger and more sophisticated AI models, the speed at which data can be delivered to AI processors is becoming increasingly important.
DDN’s Infinia platform is designed to address this challenge by removing the I/O bottlenecks that can leave expensive AI hardware waiting for data.
Infinia delivers sub-millisecond latency and up to 27 times faster KV cache , helping maximise hardware utilisation and enabling organisations to run large context windows and agentic AI workloads at speed.
For customers, the aim is straightforward: more AI output from the infrastructure available, and ultimately a lower cost per token. DDN CTO Sven Oehme said sovereign AI was about more than simply ensuring data remained within national borders.
“Sovereign AI isn’t just about where data resides, it’s about whether a nation can operate AI at scale, efficiently and without compromise,” he said.
“Our partnership with SCX brings together purpose-built inferencing infrastructure with DDN’s Infinia data platform to remove the single biggest barrier to AI performance: the data layer.
“By eliminating I/O bottlenecks and enabling extreme concurrency with sub-millisecond latency, we’re fundamentally changing the economics of inference – delivering higher utilisation, lower cost per token and true enterprise-grade sovereignty.
“This is how countries turn AI ambition into real, operational capability.”
Tackling AI’s power problem
The partnership also addresses another challenge facing the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure globally: the enormous amount of power and cooling required to support growing compute demand.
SCX.ai’s infrastructure uses purpose-built SambaNova AI processors and is designed to generate significantly more AI compute from the power and physical footprint available inside existing commercial data centres.
Unlike many conventional AI data centre systems that rely on water-intensive liquid cooling, SCX.ai’s architecture uses air cooling, avoiding the need for large volumes of water.
Testing disclosed by SCX.ai ahead of its ASX listing showed its SambaNova-based infrastructure delivering approximately 2.5 to 5.6 times the performance per watt of GPU-based systems across selected stable inference workloads, depending on the model and hardware configuration tested.
For organisations looking to deploy AI at scale, that efficiency has the potential to increase the amount of AI compute that can be delivered within existing data centre power and space constraints. Scaling up after listing
SCX.ai’s move to expand its infrastructure comes as the newly listed company enters the public market with growing commercial momentum.
Contracted annual recurring revenue reached $6.5 million at the end of July, up 20.9% since May, while the platform now has more than 400 active users.
Its first sovereign AI node at Equinix SY5 in Sydney is operational and SCX.ai is accelerating deployment of Node 2, which is targeted to be operational by the end of 2026.
The company is also progressing plans for additional nodes as it builds out a national sovereign AI inference network.
The expanded capacity will support bespoke enterprise workloads as well as Project MAGPiE, SCX.ai’s sovereign large language model specifically fine-tuned for the Australian cultural and commercial context.
This article was developed in collaboration with SCX.ai, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
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