AI’s new currency is compute. OpenAI and AMD’s 6GW pact jolts markets, fusing chips, capital and energy into a global buildout. From Wall Street to the Global South, data centres become power plants for the information age, an equity compute loop spinning at breakneck speed.
SimonMed Imaging has confirmed a ransomware attack by the Medusa group, exposing the sensitive health and personal data of 1.27 million patients. The breach, which originated in January, highlights the severe risks posed by third-party vendor vulnerabilities in the healthcare sector.
The Australian Signals Directorate's latest Annual Cyber Threat Report reveals a cybercrime is reported every 6 minutes, with costs to businesses soaring. The report highlights the growing threat from state-sponsored actors and the impact of AI in enabling larger, faster attacks on the nation.
AI’s new currency is compute. OpenAI and AMD’s 6GW pact jolts markets, fusing chips, capital and energy into a global buildout. From Wall Street to the Global South, data centres become power plants for the information age, an equity compute loop spinning at breakneck speed.
As we enter the final quarter of 2025, the classic rinse-and-repeat scenario unfolds: traders cling to Wall Street gains or brace for pullbacks, eyeing the next headline that might move markets. But when it comes to the AI race, something fundamentally different is happening—billionaires are moving markets, and there is no end in sight to further acceleration of capital in the largest transformation this generation has seen. Be aware, and ask: who benefits first? Clearly, compute power and energy are in relentless demand, commanding over $US250 billion in aggregate AI infrastructure revenue during 2025 alone. But this is more than one sector amongst many—it has become, like the ring in Tolkien's tale, the one ring to rule them all in capital markets. No other sector can keep up with the gravitational force AI infrastructure now exerts.
Now, Australia emerges not just as a regional player, but as a net exporter of data center expertise and AI-native talent—its engineers and architects deploying sovereign infrastructure from Johor in Malaysia to Singapore and even Japan. Capital markets are taking notice: the “movers and shakers,” the new Lords of the Data Centers, are no longer confined to Silicon Valley or Seattle. From Santiago to Nairobi, Jakarta to Brisbane, nations blessed with abundant sun, vast tracts of land, and resilient water resources are positioning themselves as the foundational bedrock of the next digital era.
This month alone has delivered a powerful signal that the playbook for capital is being reinvented before our eyes. Megadeals are surging at the dynamic nexus of private enterprise and public infrastructure, shattering old assumptions about financing and fueling the next great leap in digital transformation. At the core of this revolution lies a new form of power—not drawn from vaults of gold or wells of oil, but forged in the relentless hum of computing infrastructure. Raw, scalable, energy-hungry compute has emerged as the defining asset of our era, and those who command it are shaping the future of global markets.
The collision of artificial intelligence, capital, and sheer energy is redrawing the global economic map, and nowhere is this more evident than in the recent blockbuster deal between OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Announced on 6th October 2025, this partnership—a multi-billion-dollar pact for six gigawatts of computing power—is far more than a corporate handshake. It's a seismic shift that's rattled Wall Street, supercharged the semiconductor sector, and signalled a fundamental rewrite of the rules for the information age. AMD shares erupted 24-30% within hours of the announcement, vaulting the company's market capitalisation by $63.4 billion to $330.6 billion—catapulting it past industrial titans like Coca-Cola, General Electric, and Chevron.
OpenAI & AMD are partnering to deploy 6GW of AMD GPUs.
— OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) October 6, 2025
This enables OpenAI to scale next-gen AI infrastructure powered by AMD Instinct GPUs, beginning with a 1GW deployment in the second half of 2026.https://t.co/0A5hqs0c4z
The Nasdaq and S&P 500 both struck record closing highs on the same day, demonstrating how a single deal from a privately held company—OpenAI—can move not just individual stocks but entire markets, validating the thesis that AI infrastructure commands the same gravitational force as any publicly traded tech behemoth.
At its heart, the deal is a colossal bet on AI's future, worth over $100 billion when fully deployed through 2030. OpenAI, the outfit behind ChatGPT, has locked in a multi-year, multi-generation rollout of AMD's Instinct MI450 Series GPUs, kicking off with a one-gigawatt deployment in the second half of 2026. To put that in perspective, six gigawatts is enough juice to power nearly five million American homes—roughly triple the output of the Hoover Dam—or six times San Francisco's peak electricity demand.
This is not merely a hardware order; it is paving the way for a series of deep strategic fusions, sealed with financial arrangements that tie the two companies' futures together whilst opening paths for other centurion billionaires and governments to strike deals that keep the AI circular economy accelerating. As part of the agreement, AMD has granted OpenAI warrants to buy up to 160 million shares—potentially a 10% stake—at a token price of $0.01 per share, provided OpenAI hits aggressive deployment targets and AMD's share price reaches milestones up to $600. This financial structure represents a template for future partnerships, where equity, capital, and computing resources are exchanged amongst a limited group of companies driving the technology forwards, creating an interconnected corporate ecosystem that reinforces the AI buildout at unprecedented scale.
And let's be clear: the AI circular economy has once again slingshotted toward the moon. It's starting to feel less like hype and more like a fusion reactor—ideas are being spat out AI-style, at a pace that mirrors the raw output of a live reactor. This isn't just tailwind; it's a full-blown gale, with tech giants collectively investing up to $320 billion in AI infrastructure in 2025 alone, projected to exceed $500 billion by 2026. Billions of users and citizens still haven't clocked the transformation hurtling their way. From software developers to administrative assistants, the scale of this infrastructure shift is no different from the advent of steam engines or the Hoover Dam itself—it's foundational, epoch-defining, and already underway.
“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. “AMD’s leadership in high-performance chips will enable us to accelerate progress and bring the benefits of advanced AI to everyone faster.”
This frenzy of investment is creating what CNBC journalist MacKenzie Sigalos describes as a "tightly wound circular economy" where capital, equity, and compute are traded amongst the same handful of dominant firms. OpenAI's October partnership with Broadcom to design and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI chips exemplifies this dynamic. Combined with commitments from Nvidia (10 gigawatts), AMD (six gigawatts), and Oracle (4.5 gigawatts), Altman has pledged 30 gigawatts of capacity in mere weeks—representing more than 15 times OpenAI's current computing power.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman defended the scale to CNBC, stating:
"This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do".
Yet critics warn this resembles circular financing: OpenAI promises hundreds of billions to infrastructure partners like Nvidia and Oracle, who simultaneously invest in OpenAI, then recoup funds through chip sales and data centre leases.
Varun Sivaram, founder of power-focused startup Emerald AI, remains sceptical:
"There is no way today that our grids, with our power plants, can supply that energy to those projects, and it can't possibly happen on the timescale that AI is trying to accomplish".
The intersection of artificial intelligence, data centre infrastructure, and energy availability has emerged as the defining strategic contest of the late 2020s. This special editorial series examines how capital allocation decisions—from Macquarie Bank's $A61 billion exit to Sam Altman's insatiable appetite for compute power—are reshaping the global landscape. As frontier AI models demand exponentially greater resources, the question is no longer which countries will build the most powerful algorithms, but which nations can sustainably provide the land, power, and water that AI requires. In Part One, we explore Macquarie's calculated retreat, the Southern Pivot towards Asia-Pacific infrastructure, and the transformation of data centres from speculative bets to critical national assets. Part Two examines Australia's unique resource advantages, technological innovations addressing water scarcity, and the geopolitical implications of the circular economy driving trillion-dollar infrastructure investments.
The implications for capital allocation are profound, extending far beyond the stock market. Macquarie Bank's $A61 billion exit from United States data centres—selling Aligned Data Centers to a consortium including BlackRock's AI Infrastructure Partnership, Microsoft, and Nvidia for $US40 billion—stands as a key indicator of a gargantuan infrastructure race that is quietly reshaping the global landscape. This calculated retreat follows the Australian investment giant's record-breaking $A24 billion AirTrunk divestment in 2024, demonstrating a disciplined approach to capturing premium valuations whilst technology titans like Sam Altman continue their insatiable appetite for power and semiconductors. The insatiable demand for AI compute has ignited a modern-day land rush, as hyperscalers and AI labs scour countries for locations suitable for sprawling data centre campuses requiring vast tracts of land, immense power, and critically, water resources.
Since 2022, technology giants including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have poured over $US1 trillion into AI infrastructure—a figure dwarfing the inflation-adjusted $US500 billion cost of the entire United States interstate highway system built over four decades.
Whilst the titans of Silicon Valley engage in a trillion-dollar infrastructure race on home soil, a strategic and consequential pivot is unfolding across the globe. The immense pressures of the AI boom in the United States—strained power grids, land scarcity, and geopolitical fragility—are creating a powerful vacuum that the Global South is moving decisively to fill.
From 2026 into the next decade, a new map of technological influence is being drawn, with capital, resources, and strategic importance rerouting towards key nodes in Southeast Asia and Australia. This is not merely a story of outsourcing; it is the dawn of a multipolar AI world, where the Global South is emerging as a critical architect of the digital future.
Australian competitor NextDC is aggressively expanding into Asia under chief executive Craig Scroggie's leadership, signalling confidence that the infrastructure boom has years to run. The ASX-listed operator secured its first 10-megawatt hyperscale customer ahead of launching its Kuala Lumpur facility (KL1) in early 2026, representing 15 per cent of the data centre's capacity and validating what Scroggie calls "unprecedented hyper-growth" across the Asia-Pacific region. With 17 operational facilities and nine sites under development—including planned expansions in Tokyo, Bangkok, Thailand, and a second Malaysian site in Johor—NextDC has raised $A2.2 billion in debt financing specifically for its regional push.
Scroggie's strategic vision positions NextDC as delivering "sovereign, AI-native digital infrastructure" built on five pillars: speed, scale, security, sustainability, and sovereignty. This resonates powerfully across Southeast Asia's booming market, which attracted over $US30 billion in AI data centre investments during the first half of 2024 alone, with Deloitte projecting $US1 trillion in regional GDP contribution by 2030.
The competition intensifies with Vantage Data Centers' September acquisition of Yondr Group's massive 300-megawatt-plus hyperscale campus in Malaysia's Johor state, financed by $US1.6 billion from Gulf sovereign wealth funds GIC and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Under Jeremy Deutsch's leadership as president for Asia-Pacific, Vantage now commands one gigawatt of regional capacity, making it amongst the largest providers of sustainable AI and cloud infrastructure across the region. The Johor facility's first 96-megawatt phase is entirely leased to Oracle, with sources indicating the technology giant has committed to an additional 96 megawatts—demonstrating how hyperscalers are locking in capacity years before facilities come online. This strategic rerouting of resources is fundamentally reshaping the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century, with Australia and Southeast Asia no longer peripheral players but indispensable partners in securing the future of the internet and the global information economy.
Robin Khuda's journey—chronicled in Forbes Australia's October cover story—encapsulates the data centre sector's transformation from speculative bet to critical infrastructure. Nearly a decade ago, Khuda risked everything, including his house and his savings, on a vision that few understood: the world's hunger for data was about to explode, and existing infrastructure wasn't built to handle it.
Rakesh Patel
He founded AirTrunk with a simple but audacious thesis—build hyperscale data centres bigger, faster, and cheaper than anyone thought possible. What once seemed a masterstroke to bet on cloud computing has now evolved into a baseline requirement as generative AI moves into full-scale deployment. Khuda's ultimate vindication arrived with Blackstone's $A24 billion acquisition of AirTrunk in September 2024—Australia's largest private equity buyout—catapulting him into the billionaire class whilst validating the hyperscale model he pioneered. The AirTrunk playbook—growing from 450 megawatts in 2020 to over 1.8 gigawatts across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Malaysia—provided the template that NextDC, Vantage, and others now replicate at accelerating speed.
Yet as frontier model developers seek exponentially more compute power across the world, the question shifts from validation to sustainability. We are now moving into what industry observers describe as "the second inning" of the AI infrastructure race, with agentic AI and frontier model development demanding exponentially greater resources. Epoch AI research projects that the largest frontier AI training runs in 2030 will likely draw four to 16 gigawatts of power—enough to power millions of homes—with total AI capacity worldwide potentially exceeding 100 gigawatts.
This represents approximately five per cent of United States total power generation capacity, a staggering concentration of resources for a single industry. Current estimates suggest agentic AI alone will become a $US47 billion market by 2030, nearly 10 times 2024 levels, with AI agents potentially generating more than half of all online data by decade's end.
The compound effect—greater data creation fuelling increased cloud usage, which accelerates AI adoption and innovation—creates a powerful flywheel that underpins continued infrastructure investment.
Between 2026 and 2030, this shift will accelerate. The Southern Hemisphere—once peripheral in the tech narrative—is becoming a strategic stronghold. Its natural endowments offer more than cost efficiency; they promise resilience, sustainability, and sovereignty in an age where compute is power. For nations aligned in vision and infrastructure, this is not just an economic opportunity—it is a geopolitical imperative. And as the rings of AI multiply across the globe, the balance of influence may well tilt not toward the North, but toward the sun-drenched South.
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