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Records to 2026-09

Sovereign AI

Sovereign programme record · Australia · 2025

Australia: ~$26M in government funding

Australia: National AI Plan + GovAI Sovereign Compute

  • Announced—

    No announced dollar amount on record.

  • Government funding~$26M
  • Committed—

    No committed dollar amount on record.

  • Disbursed—

    No disbursed dollar amount on record.

Funding stages share a dollar scale. A hatched track marks an absent figure and gives its reason. Tildes mark estimated figures.

Operating compute / delivered hardware. Reported operational or delivered: 120 NVIDIA H200 (physical hardware); 16 NVIDIA A100 (physical hardware); 640 NVIDIA V100 (physical hardware); 768 AMD Instinct MI250X (physical hardware).

Hardware on record

ModelCountStatusOrganisation / role
NVIDIA H200120OperationalNCI Gadi (government, ANU)

Physical hardware: Gadi’s H200 partition: 30 nodes with four GPUs each. Primary source

NVIDIA A10016OperationalNCI Gadi (government, ANU)

Physical hardware: Gadi’s A100 partition: two nodes with eight GPUs each. Primary source

NVIDIA V100640OperationalNCI Gadi (government, ANU)

Physical hardware: Gadi’s V100 partition: 160 nodes with four GPUs each. Primary source

AMD Instinct MI250X768OperationalPawsey Setonix (government)

Physical hardware: Setonix’s 192 GPU nodes each contain four physical MI250X modules; each module has two compute dies. Primary source

Empanelled partners · 6

PartnerAcceleratorsModelStageSource
National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)—NVIDIA H200; NVIDIA A100; NVIDIA V100CommissionedPrimary source · 2025-12-02

Operates Gadi at the Australian National University. Its GPU partitions comprise 30 four-H200 nodes, two eight-A100 nodes and 160 four-V100 nodes. Researchers use the system for simulation, data analysis and AI.

  • Programme-level disclosure
Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre—AMD MI250X; NVIDIA GH200CommissionedPrimary source · 2025-12-02

Operates Setonix in Perth, an HPE Cray EX system with 192 GPU nodes. Each node contains four physical MI250X cards, each with two software-visible GPU dies. The separate Setonix-Q pilot provides GH200-based quantum simulation and access to quantum computers through a merit allocation scheme.

  • Programme-level disclosure
HPE Cray——CommissionedResearch database · 2022-01-01

Supplied the HPE Cray EX architecture used by Pawsey’s Setonix supercomputer.

  • Programme-level disclosure
Firmus (Project Southgate)—NVIDIA (model unspecified)AnnouncedPress or analyst · 2025-11-14

Project Southgate is a commercial AI infrastructure partnership with CDC Data Centres and NVIDIA. Firmus’s October 2025 announcement specifies an initial A$4.5B investment in Melbourne and a planned national expansion to 1.6 GW through 2028.

  • Announcement before tender
Microsoft——AnnouncedResearch database · 2026-04-23

Announced A$25B (US$18B) in Australian digital infrastructure investment on 23 April 2026, with capital and operating expenditure through 2029. The announcement builds on its October 2023 investment and follows the December 2025 National AI Plan.

  • Announcement before tender
Amazon Web Services——AnnouncedResearch database · 2025-06-01

Announced A$20B for 2025–2029 to expand, operate and maintain Australian data centres. The investment serves AWS cloud and AI customers; it is a corporate infrastructure budget.

  • Announcement before tender

External dependence

NVIDIA hardware: High · US technology: High. These are editorial assessments based on the programme’s procurement disclosures.

Named partners: CSIRO, Department of Industry, Science and Resources, OpenAI, NextDC, AWS, Microsoft, NCI, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.

The December 2025 National AI Plan brings together existing funding for AI research and adoption with measures to expand local infrastructure. It describes GovAI as an Australian-hosted service through which public agencies can develop AI applications. NCI and Pawsey operate research computing systems; Microsoft, AWS and Firmus have announced separate commercial infrastructure investments.

Data-quality caveats on this record · 4

  • The plan combines more than A$460M of existing AI and related funding. Its A$39.9M measure supports AI policy and capability, including the National AI Centre.
  • Gadi has 120 H200, 16 A100 and 640 V100 GPUs. Setonix has 768 physical MI250X cards across 192 nodes; software exposes their 1,536 GPU dies separately. Both systems support research workloads, including AI.
  • Microsoft, AWS and Firmus announce investment in their own commercial infrastructure. Their budgets have different dates and scopes, including construction, operations and expansion.
  • The A$39.9M policy and capability measure is approximately US$26.2M at the Federal Reserve H.10 rate of US$0.6556 per Australian dollar on 2 December 2025.

The evidence trail

15 cited sources

Machine accessThe same record, machine-readable: the evidence-trail feed and the derivation-chain export.