Firmus Technologies is turning up the heat on the AI infrastructure race—without burning excess energy. The Australia- and Singapore-based company has tapped Rafay Systems, a specialist in cloud-native orchestration, to add Platform-as-a-Service capabilities to the Firmus AI Cloud.

The partnership promises to streamline how developers train, fine-tune, and deploy AI models, giving enterprises and startups alike a smoother path from prototype to production.

A Full-Stack AI Factory

At the heart of this integration is Firmus’ AI FactoryOS, a proprietary operating system that manages compute, cooling, and orchestration. Layer Rafay’s orchestration platform on top, and you get a frictionless, full-stack experience tailored for AI workloads at scale.

That means self-service access to everything from bare metal GPU clusters to developer-ready AI services. For data scientists, it translates into a no-fuss toolkit: Jupyter Notebooks, ML workbenches, and NVIDIA’s growing AI suite, including NIM. Developers, meanwhile, gain streamlined serverless inference and fine-tuning options—making it easier to build business-specific models without wrangling infrastructure.

Southgate: Australia’s Green AI Powerhouse

The integration also opens the door to Project Southgate, Firmus’ flagship deployment and the largest GPU cluster in Australia. Southgate is designed with dense compute efficiency and powered by renewable energy, cutting both cost and carbon impact.

“Rafay helps us offer a best-in-class experience to users accessing Southgate compute—turning next-gen hardware into a highly usable, low-friction cloud environment,” said Dr. Daniel Kearney, CTO at Firmus Technologies.

For developers in Asia-Pacific, that means access to serious GPU horsepower without the usual complexity—or environmental baggage.

Rafay’s Take

Rafay, no stranger to scaling Kubernetes-based workloads, sees the partnership as a step toward democratizing enterprise AI in the region.

“With our Kubernetes Operations Platform integrated into the Firmus AI Cloud, users of all sizes in the region now gain the control and scalability they need to go from prototyping to production with unprecedented agility and cost-efficiency,” said Haseeb Budhani, CEO and co-founder of Rafay.

Why It Matters

The Firmus-Rafay tie-up is another sign of how fast the AI infrastructure market is evolving. Hyperscalers like AWS and Azure may dominate cloud AI, but regional players such as Firmus are carving out niches with sovereign, sustainable, and developer-friendly platforms.

For enterprises wary of data sovereignty issues—or just tired of ballooning cloud bills—the appeal of a vertically integrated, energy-efficient AI stack is obvious.

If the partnership delivers as promised, Firmus could position itself as a serious alternative in Asia-Pacific’s AI infrastructure ecosystem—one that combines cutting-edge compute with green credentials and a developer-first experience.

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