Jakarta. Groq and Equinix on Monday launched a high-speed AI inference deployment in Sydney, positioning Australia as a regional AI compute hub that can serve markets across Asia-Pacific, including Indonesia.

The installation places 7,776 Groq LPUs across 108 racks inside Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data center, supported by 4.5MW of power. Groq said the site delivers up to five times faster inference at lower cost compared with traditional GPUs and hyperscaler clouds.

Regional Reach, Data Sovereignty, and Indonesian Implications
Groq CEO Jonathan Ross demonstrated the system running live from the Sydney facility, showing near-instant responses as he generated itineraries, ran multi-step reasoning, queried historical data, and created interactive code outputs in real time. Ross said hosting inference hardware in Sydney eliminates over 250 milliseconds of latency for regional users and compounds benefits for agentic workloads that require multiple model calls. He added that much of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, falls within the deployment’s acceptable low-latency radius, making it suitable for enterprise and production use cases.

Responding to Jakarta Globe’s question on data sovereignty, Ross highlighted that Groq’s architecture does not store user data.

“We don’t store data,” he said. “Everything stays in volatile memory. When power is removed, it disappears, and within an hour it’s overwritten.” He said this design allows Groq to meet strict regulatory environments by decoupling compute from data location, aligning with sovereignty requirements in Australia, Indonesia, and other ASEAN countries.

Equinix Asia-Pacific President Cyrus Adaggra added that the company already operates in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, allowing customers to keep data in-country while leveraging Groq’s performance through Equinix Fabric, its software-defined interconnection service.

International Data Corporation (IDC) projects AI and generative AI spending in Asia-Pacific to reach $110 billion by 2028, growing at a 24 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), underscoring rising demand for regional compute capacity.

Australian Assistant Minister for Science Andrew Charlton welcomed the partnership, saying it “strengthens Australia’s digital ecosystem and our wider economy.” He confirmed that Australia’s national AI plan will be released by the end of this year, and said the country must “not only adopt AI” but help “build a positive future” for the technology.

Ross also disclosed that Groq has already invested $50 million in Australia and plans to scale up to $300 million, depending on demand.

For Indonesia, the deployment means faster access to high-performance inference compute, stronger compliance pathways, and a significant shift in regional competitiveness as Australia positions itself as the main AI infrastructure hub for Southeast Asia.