| Data residency |
Your facility, your jurisdiction. Physical custody is demonstrable to an assessor on a site visit. |
Split by classification. Requires a documented data-flow map and enforced egress controls. |
Australian regions with Australian-operated support. Contractual and physical residency, no offshore administration path. |
| Cost shape |
Capital up front, low marginal cost per job. Wins where sustained utilisation stays above roughly 60 per cent. |
Capital for the steady state, operating spend for the peaks. Needs a commitment strategy or you pay twice. |
Operating spend only. Predictable monthly, and more expensive per FLOP once load is continuous. |
| Time to first workload |
Roughly 8 to 16 weeks, gated by power, floor space and component lead times. |
Two to six weeks for the cloud portion, with the owned portion following. |
Days to weeks, subject to accreditation paperwork rather than engineering. |
| Elasticity |
Fixed. Burst capacity must be planned and funded a financial year ahead. |
Elastic at the edges, fixed at the core. The usual answer for research and rendering peaks. |
Elastic within regional capacity. Accelerator availability, not contract terms, is the practical ceiling. |
| Classification ceiling |
Up to and including fully air-gapped environments with no external route. |
PROTECTED where the boundary is documented, tested and enforced. |
PROTECTED under assessed control sets. Confirm the current assessment status in writing. |
| Key custody |
You hold the hardware security module and the keys. We never need them. |
Split custody with a documented break-glass procedure and dual control. |
Customer-managed keys, held in-country, revocable by you without a support ticket. |
| Typical fit |
Sustained model training, defence enclaves, sub-microsecond trading paths. |
Research with seasonal demand, media rendering, platforms growing faster than their forecast. |
Agencies without a data-centre programme, regulated startups, disaster recovery estates. |