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Sharon AI Shares Surge as Company Secures $1.8bn Data Centre Deal

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Australian-founded tech company Sharon AI has surged on Wall Street overnight after signing a $1.8bn data centre deal.

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Australian-founded neocloud provider Sharon AI has secured a $1.8 billion agreement to deploy approximately 8,200 Nvidia high-performance GPUs across NEXTDC data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. This significant expansion of local compute infrastructure is intended to scale processing power for research, government, and commercial enterprise applications within Australia. While the deal represents a major advancement in sovereign AI capability and infrastructure, it primarily focuses on commercial scaling of compute rather than explicit AI safety protocols or catastrophic risk mitigation frameworks. The development underscores the rapid growth of frontier AI hardware deployment in the Australian market, which carries long-term implications for domestic governance and oversight of high-compute AI models.

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Sharon AI shares surge as company secures $1.8bn data centre dealAn Australian tech company’s shares have rocketed on Wall Street after signing a $1.8bn deal for data centres in Melbourne and Sydney.Blair Jacksonless than 2 min readApril 2, 2026 - 9:08AMNewsWireAustralian-founded tech company Sharon AI has surged on Wall Street overnight after signing a $1.8bn data centre deal.Sharon AI will put thousands of high-performance AI chips into data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.Bolstering the data centres will power research, government and business computing, the company says.Listed on the Nasdaq exchange in the US, the company announced the $1.8bn deal on Wednesday US time.Shares in Sharon AI rose 21.5 per cent, taking the company’s valuation to $US440m ($A657m).The deal announced Wednesday involves Sharon AI operating Nvidia chips in the NEXTDC data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.Founded in Sydney by James Manning, Andrew Leece and Nick Hughes-Jones, Sharon AI, with the Nasdaq company code of SHAZ, does not build data centres but installs and runs equipment in existing centres – making the company a “neocloud” operator.Under the deal, the company will install about 8200 Nvidia chips in the NEXTDC data centres in Melbourne and Sydney, along with 17.8 petabytes (17,000 terabytes) of storage.Sharon AI already operates a grouping of the Nvidia AI processor GPU chips at NEXTDC’s M3 data centre.The company listed on the Nasdaq in February, raising $US125m.Capital Brief reports the firm is looking at listing on the ASX before July 1.Full-year financial results posted on Wednesday show the company has more than tripled revenue to $US1.57m ($A2.28m) this year on the back of its cloud services.The financial results also revealed a deal with Canva.Read related topics:MelbourneSydneyMore related storiesRetailMajor Aussie shopping platform collapsesA major Aussie online shopping platform inspired by the US’ Cyber Monday sales has collapsed into liquidation.Read moreSecurityMove to combat North Korean cyber crooksCyber attacks funding North Korea’s military have pushed Australia into a joint venture with the US, Canada and Google.Read moreInnovation‘Revolutionary’: Albo inks massive AI dealA US-based artificial intelligence company is bringing its technology to Australian researchers after the federal government signed a huge deal.Read more