Aussie AI firm pleases Wall Street with $1.8bn data centre deal

The company does not build data centres but installs equipment into existing centres and is what is known as a “neocloud” firm.

After announcing the deal on Wednesday US time, Sharon AI shares rose 21.5 per cent, leading to its valuation growing to US$440 million, roughly A$657 million.

The company is looking to go public in Australia before 1 July, following major success, tripling revenue to US$1.57 million (roughly A$2.28 million) this year.

AI isn’t good for all Australian businesses

This closely follows Atlassian’s share price dropping 8.4 per cent amid concerns regarding the loss of more desk roles as Anthropic and Amazon continue their partnered development of next-generation AI.

The latest drop came as Amazon Web Services (AWS) revealed its development of a new agentic AI for business development and sales.

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Prior to this, Anthropic’s developments with Claude saw a number of software firms suffer, including Atlassian, when the AI giant announced new plugins for its Claude Cowork platform that would allow the agentic AI platform to be further tailored for performing specific tasks on user devices.

Over the past year, this has led to a total share price slump of 70 per cent for Atlassian. Together, Mike Cannon-Brookes and former chief executive and co-founder Scott Farquhar have lost a joint total of $35 billion just this year, causing both to slip out of the top 10 richest people in the country.

Still, Cannon-Brookes remains bullish about AI, having terminated thousands of positions over the last year, with the latest 1,600 being axed just last month, all with the intention of increasing AI investment.