Cisco and SharonAI Holdings and its subsidiaries (Sharon AI), a leading Australian neocloud, announced the launch of Australia’s first Cisco Secure AI Factory in partnership with NVIDIA.

This initiative marks a significant leap forward in providing Australia with secure, scalable and high-performance sovereign AI capabilities, with all data and AI processing kept within the country. By delivering robust national digital infrastructure and upholding data sovereignty, the Cisco Secure AI Factory helps power an AI-enabled economy, supporting the development, adoption, and responsible use of AI in alignment with Australia’s new National AI Plan.

Sharon AI will offer a variety of solutions tailored to different customer needs and industries. Customers will also have access to a sandbox environment to experiment with proofs-of-concept. At the foundation of these offers is the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, powered by:

Cisco’s UCS servers, together with Cisco's security and networking portfolio delivering accelerated AI capabilities, and Nexus Hyperfabric as part of the Nexus One unified management plane.

1024 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, delivering breakthrough performance and flexibility for complex AI and machine learning tasks.

VAST Data’s cutting-edge storage systems provide fast, reliable, and scalable data access to support demanding AI workloads.

NEXTDC’s world-class Australian data centres provide resilient, sovereign hosting for all critical infrastructure.

“AI innovation is accelerating and Cisco is delivering the critical infrastructure Australia needs to move fast and adopt AI safely and securely. The Cisco Secure AI Factory enables enterprises and governments to harness their data for differentiation, unlocking innovation and competitive advantage, by strengthening sovereign capabilities and building a trustworthy AI ecosystem. This collaboration positions Australia at the forefront of secure, responsible AI,” said Stefan Leitl, Vice President & General Manager, Cisco Australia & New Zealand.

“We are excited to have partnered with Cisco and NVIDIA to accelerate enterprise AI and high-performance compute adoption throughout Asia-Pacific. This 1024 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra deployment has been architected and deployed alongside Cisco to ensure that together we can bring unprecedented value to customers. We look forward to further collaboration with the Cisco team to drive enterprise AI adoption and additional clusters in 2026 and beyond,” said James Manning, Co-Founder and CEO, Sharon AI.

“Secure, sovereign AI infrastructure is a critical resource for enterprises across the Asia-Pacific region. Sharon AI and Cisco are accelerating the next wave of innovation with NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs to provide Australia with its first Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA,” said Sudarsharn Ramachandran, Country Manager – Enterprise Australia & New Zealand, NVIDIA.