Company Interview / The Aussie AI contender preparing to go public

Key points:

Keane promotes SCX.ai as an efficient, sovereign AI infrastructure provider for Australia SambaNova ADO chips are positioned as lower‑power, no‑water alternative to traditional GPUs IPO aims to raise $40 million to fund two Australian AI “factories” Keane highlights growing investor focus on AI inferencing capacity and “tokens”

David Keane from SCX.ai sets out a case for a new phase of the AI boom, centred on efficient, sovereign AI infrastructure rather than ever-larger, power‑hungry data centres. Keane states that SCX.ai is preparing to list in August as Australia’s first pure‑play AI infrastructure company, raising $40 million underwritten by Canaccord and Henslow. The company’s focus is an AI inferencing platform using SambaNova ADO chips, which Keane says are built specifically for running large language models with lower power use, no water‑cooled GPUs and higher throughput.

Keane argues that Australia must retain AI sovereignty, keeping data, models and workloads onshore while giving local organisations control over the infrastructure processing their data. He welcomes the Australian government’s emphasis on energy and water efficiency for data centres, contending that operators not optimising efficiency will face growing cost headwinds.

SCX.ai’s “node one” AI factory in New South Wales is described as fully operational and already serving hundreds of Australian organisations, with IPO funds earmarked to complete node one and build node two. Keane says investors in Australia and the United States are increasingly focused on “AI tokens” and inferencing capacity as the core infrastructure needed to drive future AI applications and productivity growth.