Sharon AI plans AI compute campus on former Albury paper mill site

Sharon AI is hiring staff and looking for capital for a data centre campus at Albury in regional New South Wales, Forbes Australia reported on 29 October 2026. The company confirmed in September that it had bought a retired paper mill in the city, and job ads published on Tuesday now describe the site as a "next-generation AI compute campus". The ads say Sharon is recruiting "on behalf of an affiliated new venture", so the company may not build the campus itself. It is unclear whether that venture is a spin-off or a company incubated by Sharon, and Sharon declined to comment.

The plan would mark a shift in approach. Sharon has so far secured Nvidia GPUs and installed clusters inside data centres run by operators such as NextDC and Equinix. Forbes said building its own facilities would make it more like Firmus, which wants to build large AI factories. The job ads seek people to run such a facility and also people to help fund it, with the company aiming to raise money from "institutional investors, infrastructure funds, family offices and strategic financing partners."

Sharon reported $8.8 billion in total contract value as of 6 August, against $1.93 million in revenue for the three months to 30 June. It has secured US$2.6 billion in equity and debt financing, and its filings with the US regulator show it plans to spend around $6 billion on infrastructure, GPUs and other equipment. Its largest investor is Situational Awareness, the investment house run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.

Market conditions have softened. Sharon listed on the Nasdaq at US$30 a share in February, rose above US$90 by late June, and has since halved in the past month to US$25.75. Forbes noted that Firmus tried and failed to list on the ASX, and that CoreWeave has fallen 46 per cent over six months. NextDC fell 40 per cent after delays to its M3 expansion in Melbourne, which it blamed on Jemena pushing back grid upgrades, and Sharon runs a GPU cluster inside M3.

Sharon is also preparing for local scrutiny, hiring a community lead to protect its reputation, support project approvals and deliver local benefits. In a company post on 28 October, chief operating officer David Burns described the existing model as partner-first co-location that avoids the longest lead items such as substations and transmission lines. He said Sharon has a presence in 12 sites across Australia and New Zealand, 11 of them in Australia, and 120 MW of contracted customer agreements against 212 MW of available capacity with power to site.