Firmus and CDC end Project Southgate after building 42MW of planned 1.6GW

Project Southgate, the 1.6-gigawatt Australian buildout that Firmus and CDC Data Centres announced in October 2025, has ended with 42 megawatts built at a CDC data center in Melbourne, and the two companies offer different accounts of why the plan shrank to that. Data Center Dynamics reported the split and attributed the substance to the Australian Financial Review.

CDC was first to speak. Its chief executive, Greg Boorer, told the Australian Financial Review in September that the companies were moving apart because Firmus' large-scale expansion plans in Asia raised concern about the neocloud operator's funding and scalability; this week he told Rampart that CDC was "certainly not planning on doing 1.6GW of rollout with them because they made other choices regarding doing their own data center developments, which is slightly different to what we envisaged."

Firmus' co-CEO and co-founder Oliver Curtis gave w.media the other version: the companies "mutually agreed earlier this year not to proceed with the previously proposed Southgate development partnership." He added that the decision does not affect Firmus' current development plans, contracted customer capacity, disclosed strategy or international partnerships, described CDC as "a highly respected participant in the Australian data center sector," and wished the company well in its future developments.

On Curtis' account, the two sides agreed not to proceed earlier this year; CDC's public hint followed in September, and the confirmation has only now been reported. His statement says the decision does not affect contracted customer capacity, but the reporting does not identify those customers or the sites they sit in.

The plan being unwound was large even by the standards of the AI buildout, with Project Southgate expected to reach 1.6 gigawatts and draw up to $47.68 billion in investment; first phases under construction in Tasmania and Melbourne were planned at up to 150 megawatts sized to 54,000 Nvidia GB300s, targeting delivery in mid-2026, or 360 GPUs per megawatt. The 42 megawatts that were deployed sit at the CDC data center in Melbourne, which the Australian Financial Review says will no longer reach 150MW.

The 42 megawatts amount to about 2.6 percent of the announced 1.6 gigawatts, and the $47.68 billion the companies said they expected works out to roughly $30 million per megawatt; the reporting identifies no capital stack behind either the dollars or the capacity.

The other point of separation was Tasmania, where Firmus wants to build three data center campuses and Boorer told Rampart that plan was "misaligned" with CDC's own views on how Project Southgate should progress: a difference over who builds what, with the neocloud pulling construction toward itself and the host holding to the program it originally envisaged.

The roles explain the friction: Firmus signs capacity agreements with AI labs and needs buildings, while CDC operates the campuses those buildings sit on. That arrangement tends to fray when the customer-facing company decides it wants to be a developer too, which is what the three Tasmanian campuses suggest and what Boorer's reference to "other choices" describes.

Firmus has kept expanding in Southeast Asia, with named counterparties: agreements to provide capacity to Meta in Indonesia and to OpenAI in Malaysia. Neither name attaches to Southgate in the reporting, which identifies no tenant for the 42 megawatts in Melbourne or for the gigawatts that were never built.

Nor is there a disclosed funder. Project Southgate fits a pattern of gigawatts announced and price withheld, with "expected" investment standing in for a stack; a milestone announced without a price or a capital structure is a developer absorbing merchant risk more than a project reaching bankability, and a 1.6GW program described in terms of what it was expected to attract is the cleanest recent illustration of the difference.

Which assets the stack actually rewards is the other question the split leaves open: Firmus' named counterparties sit in Indonesia and Malaysia rather than at the abandoned site, and the reporting puts no tenant behind the Melbourne capacity that exists. If the market pays for anchor tenants ahead of buildings, the position this masthead has taken, then Firmus' bankability rests on its Southeast Asian agreements, and the Australian pipeline was the part of the portfolio most exposed to a partner's change of view.

The offering sharpens that arithmetic: Firmus is preparing to launch a public offering aimed at raising about $5 billion, and the coverage does not say where it would list or when it would come. Announced capacity carries a different burden in a prospectus than in a press release, and the offering documents would be the first place Firmus has to put its pipeline next to the megawatts it has energised.

A Melbourne campus holds 42 megawatts of deployed capacity and has given up on 150MW, and the coverage does not say what CDC plans for the balance of the site or on what terms the two sides separated. Firmus still carries three planned Tasmanian campuses, the Southeast Asian agreements and an offering to bring, and it says the split does not affect any of them. The next public account of Project Southgate will be a filing rather than an announcement, and it is where 1.6 gigawatts has to turn into capacity with a bill behind it.