Silicon Valley heavyweight Bill Tai, who was an early investor in Canva and Zoom, has backed a Perth company which aims to install data centres on Aboriginal land.
Mr Tai, through Actai Ventures, was one of several firms to invest in Perth's Sovereign Green Compute in a oversubscribed multi-million capital raising recently.
Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps and a former Facebook executive, also invested in the round.
The dollar value of the investment has not been revealed, however is understood to be in the millions.
SGC offers a novel proposal in the world of data centres: renewables-powered First Nations-owned digital infrastructure, located on-country.
It would enable co-ownership with First Nations communities via special purpose vehicles, offering modular, immersion-cooled, off-grid-capable data hubs running on renewable energy and built for remote environments.
Beyond it being purely an Indigenous-owned digital infrastructure company, SGC would integrate Indigenous ESG credits, with each site generating telemetry anchored exportable carbon and biodiversity offsets.
The company was co-founded by First Nations X and West Tech Fest co-founder Paula Taylor, Climate tech entrepreneur Jon-Paul Cox, and Quantum Australia chair and leading tech and innovation voice Peter Rossdeutscher.
“Each of our sites would be joint ventures with traditional owners of the area. We have three pilot sites we’re testing across the Pilbara and Kimberley,” Ms Taylor told Business News last year.
“We have MOUs with the Kimberley Land Council, Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation and MG Corporation. It’s built on a view that WA’s north-west has world-class expertise in energy, infrastructure, and in remote and autonomous operations; we want to build on that legacy and simultaneously empower Indigenous governance.
“First Nations leaders do not want to be left behind in the digital divide. We want to see innovation happening on country.”
Sovereign Green Compute has set several ambitious goals for 2030, including creating 1,500 First Nations jobs across 10 sites and offsetting 180,000 tonnes of carbon emissions annually.
Ms Taylor said while the pilot sites would all be small-scale modular designs for specific uses, there had been discussions about going down a more ambitious path.
And that suggestion was one Mr Tai himself backed, when speaking on a panel at last year's West Tech Fest.
He said some of the largest tech companies in the world were interested in the idea when Mr Tai and Ms Taylor visited them last year.
"I was like, Paula, you've got to come out to California. I need you here like now, because there’s this group of energy people I'm meeting," Mr Tai said.
"And, you know, sure enough, a Senior VP of Nvidia was there, we ran the idea by him; the next day he was calling, asking 'How can we start?'.
"Microsoft was interested as well. All of these giant hyperscalers are looking at Western Australia, the opportunity is in this state."
It will be a marriage of WA companies as well, with SGC currently in talks with Perth geophysics-turned-compute company DUG Technology.
Those talks, if successful, would see WA-built modular data centres - the DUG Nomad - installed on Aboriginal-owned land in partnership with precscribed body corporates.
