SEA Daily Brief: Firmus and Nvidia commit a 360MW GPU campus to Batam, BTSE opens an OJK-licensed exchange in Indonesia, and Creador's Brahmal takes the CTOS chair

Firmus and Nvidia anchor a 360MW, 170,000-GPU AI campus on Batam, just across the strait from Singapore

Australian AI-infrastructure firm Firmus Technologies and Nvidia disclosed on 29 June an eight-year partnership to stand up a 360-megawatt Nvidia DSX AI Factory campus on Batam, the Indonesian island a short ferry from Singapore. The site will host up to 170,000 Nvidia AI accelerators delivered across 2027 and 2028, with the physical facility built by Singapore-based DayOne — the operator backed by Coatue Management and SoftBank. Firmus expects US$25 billion to US$30 billion in committed offtake over the partnership's first six years, and the campus is slated to go live in the first quarter of 2027.

The positioning is deliberate. Unlike Firmus's Australian projects, which chase hyperscalers such as Meta and AWS, co-CEO Tim Rosenfield framed Batam as a multi-tenant site for "AI native" mid-size customers — an attempt, in his words, to "level the playing field" against the largest buyers. Batam matters because Singapore's own data-centre growth is capped by land, power and sustainability limits; nearby Indonesian capacity lets cloud providers serve Singapore-adjacent demand without adding megawatts inside the city-state. Firmus was valued at US$5.5 billion in an April round and is expected to pursue an IPO this year.

BTSE Group enters Indonesia through an OJK-licensed joint venture on the rebranded NVX platform

Global exchange operator BTSE Group launched BTSE Indonesia on 3 July, a joint venture with PT Aset Kripto Internasional built on NVX — the local platform that firm first launched in 2023 under a Bappebti licence. The rebranded exchange now holds a PAKD licence ("Digital Financial Assets and Crypto Assets Trading Operator") under the Financial Services Authority (OJK), which took over crypto supervision from the commodities regulator Bappebti in January 2025. The platform lists more than 200 digital assets with rupiah and USDT pairs, and supports IDR deposits, withdrawals and conversions. BTSE supplies trading infrastructure and liquidity; the local partner runs user acquisition and marketing.

The timing is pointed. BTSE is buying into Indonesia in the same window that OJK has been tightening the sector — ordering crypto influencers to obtain competency certification and restricting promotion to assets on authorised exchanges, and shutting hundreds of illegal platforms. In that environment the PAKD licence, not the product, is the differentiator: a compliant on-ramp with IDR settlement is exactly what a market of roughly 14 million crypto users lacks at scale.

Creador founder Brahmal Vasudevan takes the CTOS Digital chair as the board adds an AI-focused director

Malaysian credit-reporting firm CTOS Digital appointed Creador founder and chief executive Brahmal Vasudevan, 57, as chairman effective 1 July, succeeding retiring chair Datuk Noorazman Abd Aziz. Brahmal joins as a non-independent, non-executive director; Creador — the private-equity firm he has led since 2011 — is CTOS's largest shareholder with a stake near 20.8%. The same board refresh added Datuk Iswaraan Suppiah, previously group chief operations officer of AmBank Group, where he led digital transformation, AI adoption and automation, as an independent director.

CTOS is the dominant credit bureau in Malaysia, and the two appointments read as a single move: the largest shareholder taking the chair while installing operational AI expertise on the board. For a business whose product is scoring and risk analytics, an AmBank AI-transformation veteran is a substantive addition rather than a ceremonial one.

Eyes on the Day Ahead

Over the next few days, track whether DayOne files or discloses permitting and grid-interconnection milestones for the Batam campus — the practical test of the Q1 2027 timeline. In crypto, watch whether OJK publishes further PAKD approvals or enforcement actions in the wake of the BTSE launch, which would confirm the JV-and-rebrand route as the standard foreign on-ramp. And in Malaysia, CTOS's next investor communication should indicate how the new chair and AI-focused director translate into the analytics roadmap.