SCX joins Equinix Fabric in Australian AI expansion

SouthernCrossAI has joined the Equinix Fabric AI ecosystem and confirmed a national expansion using SambaNova SN50 chips, extending its reach to Equinix-connected customers across Australia.

Its AI inference nodes are now discoverable and accessible through Equinix Fabric, Equinix's interconnection service. That gives enterprises, government agencies and developers on the network a direct route to SCX infrastructure from within the Equinix environment.

The arrangement builds on an existing operational node at Equinix's SY5 IBX data centre in Sydney. Equinix Fabric will also serve as the main interconnection backbone for a planned multi-site network across Australia.

New nodes are planned at Equinix facilities in other Australian cities, including Melbourne and Brisbane, as SCX expands its domestic footprint. Those sites are expected to come online progressively through 2026 and 2027.

Private access

At the centre of the announcement is SCX's pitch for sovereign AI infrastructure, with inference capacity hosted onshore and connected privately rather than through the public internet. Organisations in the Asia-Pacific region can establish secure, low-latency private links to its inference nodes through Equinix Fabric instead of routing data through overseas cloud environments, according to the company.

Equinix framed the addition of SCX as part of a broader push to make AI services available through its interconnection platform. "We are excited to welcome SCX to the Equinix Fabric AI ecosystem. SCX represents exactly the kind of innovative sovereign AI provider that enterprises and government agencies need to access through Equinix Fabric - a locally governed, high-performance inferencing capability that meets Australia's data sovereignty requirements. Together, we are building the infrastructure for Australia's AI future," said Chris Johnston, Interim Managing Director, Equinix Australia.

SCX said the link-up should make its infrastructure easier to reach for customers already connected to Equinix. "Joining Equinix Fabric AI ecosystem means that any organisation connected to Equinix Fabric can now reach our sovereign inferencing nodes with a private, direct connection. This is how we scale Australian AI - not by moving data overseas, but by making world-class inference available where Australian data already lives," said David Keane, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, SCX.

Hardware rollout

Alongside the Equinix development, SCX said its national rollout will use SambaNova's SN50 Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit. The chip is SambaNova's fifth-generation design and is aimed at AI inference workloads.

SCX said the SN50 offers higher speed and throughput than Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs for agentic inference tasks while using about 20 kilowatts of power per SambaRack1. That power profile means systems can be deployed in existing air-cooled data centres without major infrastructure changes, according to the company.

SCX also highlighted the SN50's memory architecture, saying it supports models with up to 10 trillion parameters and context lengths of up to 10 million tokens. It added that the chip allows hot-swapping between models in milliseconds, which it described as important for more complex multi-model AI workflows used by enterprise and government customers.

SambaNova said the Asia-Pacific market, and Australia in particular, is becoming a notable area for sovereign AI infrastructure. "The Asia-Pacific region represents one of the most significant opportunities for sovereign AI infrastructure globally, and Australia is at the forefront of that transformation. SCX has built something genuinely unique - a full-stack sovereign AI platform that combines SambaNova's world-leading inference hardware with the connectivity and reach of the Equinix ecosystem. The deployment of the SN50 across SCX's national network will be a defining moment for Australian AI, delivering agentic inference capabilities at a price and performance level that simply wasn't possible before. We are proud to be backing SCX's expansion and deeply committed to Australia's sovereign AI future," said Harry Ault, Chief Revenue Officer, SambaNova Systems.

National build-out

The supply agreement for SN50 chips underpins SCX's expansion across additional Equinix sites, according to the company. It said the rollout will create a national network of inference capacity accessible through Equinix Fabric from multiple Australian locations.

SCX describes itself as a full-stack sovereign AI infrastructure company offering onshore inference, model hosting and platform services using SambaNova hardware. Its systems are deployed in Equinix IBX data centres, and it said the platform supports both open-weight and proprietary models, including its own Australian-optimised large language models.

SCX also said its service does not retain customer data, route workloads offshore or train models on customer information. Those claims place the business in a growing segment of the AI market where data handling, jurisdiction and network control are central to buying decisions, especially for regulated industries and public sector users.

For Equinix, the partnership adds another AI supplier to its ecosystem as data centre operators position themselves as connection hubs for AI infrastructure rather than simply landlords for servers. For SCX, it offers a route to customers already housed in the same facilities and connected to the same network fabric.

The first operational node is already live in Sydney, and the next phase of expansion will show how far SCX can turn that footprint into a broader domestic platform anchored inside Equinix sites and built on SambaNova silicon.