Australia's Firmus said on Tuesday it had signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI to supply computing capacity from two Malaysian data centres, making the ChatGPT maker an anchor customer as demand surges for infrastructure to run advanced AI models.

Firmus’ deal to sell compute to the ChatGPT maker from two planned data centres in Malaysia is not substantial enough to win over sceptical investors.

The neocloud start-up has put investor meetings in the diary for its long-awaited listing, just as Nvidia’s executives talk up data centres to Australian clients in Melbourne.