ASX release: 18 July 2023
Highlights:
- A$5 million in grant funding provided by the WA State Government.
- Expected to fund up to half the build of the first data hall and connected infrastructure.
- Will proceed to sign a lease for 44.5 hectares of land for 15 years, with two 5-year extensions.
- Compute and storage to be funded through asset-finance arrangements scaled to demand.
- Cash held at 30 June 2023 of US$8.0 million, net cash of US$5.2 million*
DUG Technology Ltd (ASX: DUG) (“DUG” or the “Company”) is delighted to announce it has executed a Financial Assistance Agreement (“FAA”) with the Western Australian (“WA”) State Government under the Investment Attraction Fund and will receive A$5 million in grant funding for the first data hall of its Geraldton High Performance Computing (“HPC”) Campus (the “Campus”). The funds will be disbursed over a two-year period in accordance with agreed milestones set out in Appendix 1.
The first data hall will have a capacity of 400 petaflops of compute, enabling a thirteen-fold growth in DUG’s compute power once fully established. This would place the facility amongst the largest supercomputers in the world^.
The initial spend will be on the construction of the first data hall and connected infrastructure, with the grant funding up to half of these costs. The Company will fund remaining costs through existing funds and cash from operations. Compute and storage assets will be transferred from the Company’s West Perth data centre and will be increased to match demand, funded through asset-finance arrangements.
The Company will now proceed to sign a lease for 44.5 hectares of land for the construction of the Campus and associated infrastructure and intends to develop onsite sustainable energy solutions.
The Campus will deploy DUG’s patented, immersion cooling solution, DUG Cool, which reduces power consumption by more than 50% compared to a traditional air-cooled data centre. This technology enables DUG to build cost-effective and highly energy-efficient data centres. The Company’s Houston data centre won the Enterprise Data Centre Design Award from Data Centre Dynamics in 2019.
The Campus is designed to accommodate a total of ten data halls with a potential 4 exaflop (4,000 petaflops) capacity.
DUG’s Managing Director, Matt Lamont, said:
“This project has the potential to be transformational for the business and for WA in data processing and storage. We have been committed to this project since 2021 and have been working through project funding solutions and groundworks required to the site.
Geraldton is an ideal location for this Campus with ready access to renewable power from wind and solar and a large physical space for expansion. The latency from Geraldton to Perth is just 3 milliseconds, hence the user experience will be near identical to working with the existing West Perth data centre. Fibre links from Geraldton to Singapore open new market opportunities.
Importantly, the project has the support of the Yamatji Southern Regional Corporation Ltd Board. DUG will partner with the Yamatji Nation People to provide a range of regional employment opportunities to the Geraldton community.
We are grateful to the WA State Government for their support, which I expect will pay dividends by creating jobs and placing WA on the global supercomputing map.”
