Australia's DUG obtains a $3.4 million grant to establish the Geraldton HPC campus

DUG, an Australian high-performance computing (HPC) company, has secured government aid for a Geraldton, Australia, campus. This week, the company announced receiving $3.4 million in government funding for its long-planned campus in Geraldton, Western Australia, approximately 250 miles north of Perth. Under the Investment Attraction Fund, DUG has signed a Financial Assistance Agreement with the Western Australian State Government. The grant funding will be released over a two-year period for the initial data hall of the Geraldton HPC Campus.

The grant will cover up to fifty percent of the costs of constructing the first data hall and connected infrastructure. Existing funds and cash flow from operations will cover the remaining expenses. In May of 2021, it was reported that the Geraldton neighborhood of Narngulu would be the site of a "200 petaflops plus" campus. The construction was scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2021, with the Stage 1 data center to be operational by the beginning of the second quarter of 2022. The company stated then that it would invest $3,8 million from existing financial reserves in the initial data hall.

DUG stated that it will now sign a lease for 44.5 hectares of land for the campus building due to the new funding. The company stated that the first data hall would have a computing capacity of 400 petaflops, presumably single-precision. Once finished, previous computing and storage resources from the Dug's current West Perth data center will be moved.

The campus is designed to house ten data centers with a reported maximum capacity of four exaflops.