SCX.ai has announced a strategic partnership with AI data intelligence company DDN, days after the company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange on 21 August following a fully underwritten $40 million initial public offering.
SCX.ai said the deal will combine its ASIC-accelerated infrastructure with DDN’s Infinia data intelligence platform to expand what it describes as Australia’s largest sovereign AI inferencing cloud, targeting Australian enterprises, government agencies and research institutions.
The companies said the combined offering is designed to provide a secure, high-performance, multi-tenant environment for AI inference workloads, while keeping models, workloads and data within Australia. SCX.ai said it aims to reduce cost per token and improve hardware utilisation through the integration.
The partnership builds on SCX.ai’s first “sovereign AI node” deployed at the Equinix SY5 data centre in Sydney. SCX.ai said DDN Infinia is intended to address data-layer performance challenges associated with high-throughput inference, including concurrency and I/O bottlenecks.
SCX.ai disclosed that contracted annual recurring revenue was $6.5 million at the end of July, up 20.9% since May, and that its platform has more than 400 active users.
“For the first time, Australian organisations have access to a fully domestic, enterprise-grade AI cloud that scales effortlessly,” said SCX founder and CEO David Keane. “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.”
The companies positioned the partnership in the context of growing demand for AI compute and infrastructure constraints, including power and cooling. SCX.ai said its infrastructure uses purpose-built SambaNova AI processors and relies on air cooling rather than water-intensive systems used by some AI data centres.
Testing disclosed by SCX.ai ahead of its listing indicated its SambaNova-based infrastructure delivered approximately 2.5x to 5.6x performance per watt compared with GPU-based systems across selected stable inference workloads, depending on the model and hardware configuration.
“Sovereign AI isn’t just about where data resides, it’s about whether a nation can operate AI at scale, efficiently and without compromise,” said DDN CTO Sven Oehme. “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.”
SCX.ai said the expanded cloud capacity will support bespoke enterprise workloads as well as its Project MAGPiE, which it describes as a sovereign large language model fine-tuned for the Australian context.
The company said its Sydney node is operational, with a second node targeted to be operational by the end of 2026, and that it is progressing plans for additional nodes as it builds out a national sovereign AI inference network.
