Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with SCX.ai Holdings (ASX:SCX), CEO David Keane
Lel Smits: SCX.ai Holdings is seeking to become one of the ASX’s newest secure player artificial intelligence companies through a proposed $40 million IPO positioning itself as Australia’s sovereign AI infrastructure and services platform. Focused on providing Australian enterprises and government agencies with secure locally hosted AI infrastructure, inference services and managed AI solutions, the company is targeting growing demand for sovereign AI capabilities as organisations prioritise data privacy, regulatory compliance and domestic AI infrastructure. I’m joined today by SCX.ai CEO David Keane.
David is the founder of ASX Success Story, Big Team Can, and he joins me to discuss the company’s proposed ASX listing, Australia’s sovereign AI opportunity, enterprise demand for locally hosted AI and how SCX.ai plans to build a leading domestic AI platform.
David, welcome to the Stock Network.
David Keane: Thank you so much for having me.
Lel Smits: Pleasure to have you on. And look, as artificial intelligence adoption accelerates globally, organisations are becoming increasingly focused on where their data is being stored and processed. Can you outline why sovereign AI is becoming such an important theme?
David Keane: Look, I see companies now in Australia sending their most sensitive data overseas just to get access to artificial intelligence capacity.
And we know that Australians need access to AI to build their businesses and create the competitive advantage that we need to grow our economy. But doing so in a way that controls our sovereign data is important to every Australian. And we believe that sovereign AI is a critical component in delivering that capacity to organisations who can then build that next generation of applications and AI agents to power their businesses into the future.
I think it’s very interesting we’re talking today, having just had the Prime Minister come out last week and talk about the government’s view on AI, where I think he made it very clear that it’s time that AI serves the interests of Australia and Australians, not the other way around. So, you know, we think that’s a great question to ask, and we believe Australians need sovereign AI delivered in a way that meets their needs and they can trust to build the future of their business on.
Lel Smits: Yes. Now, SCX.ai is seeking to raise $40 million through its proposed ASX IPO. Can you outline what this capital will enable the business to achieve?
David Keane: SCX is raising $40 million through a fully underwritten IPO. And the purpose of the IPO is to continue the buildout of our infrastructure.
SCX has built Australia’s leading AI inferencing system that enables us to create the capacity. And I’m sure many of the viewers here have heard the word AI tokens. It’s talked about a lot.
But to build the capacity to deliver those tokens in a way that organisations can use it to build the future of their businesses. And, you know, our IPO enables SCX to execute on our vision to build upon the existing work we’ve done with our initial AI factory, fully operational today and generating revenue at Equinix SY5 in Alexandria. And we’re looking forward to continuing to build out the infrastructure as we see the demand for AI tokens continuing to grow.
Lel Smits: And looking more at how you’re building Australia’s AI infrastructure on the company, you’re offering a vertically integrated platform that’s spanning AI infrastructure, inference services and managed AI applications. But can you outline how this integrated model really differentiates the company?
David Keane: Yes, of course. You know, we understand that to make use of AI, we need to provide more than just access to AI chips.
We need to provide an integrated solution that enables anybody to be able to use our APIs and our systems to integrate that AI capacity into their own applications and agents. We’ve seen hundreds of amazing Australian entrepreneurs, AI natives, and also enterprise organisations and government reaching out to SCX to talk to us about that capacity. And it’s only by combining our unique software layer that goes on top of these advanced AI chips, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, that enables us to rapidly help folks to deploy.
In fact, right on our website, we talk about the fact that our system is compatible with leading players like Anthropic and OpenAI, and that in two lines of code, we can get people running on our system. And for folks who’ve never used AI before and want to build an AI application or agents, you can be up and running in minutes. And it’s the benefit of that integrated approach that we think the market needs as deployment of AI continues to grow and the need to get access to capacity becomes a key determinant in the success of our local environment.
Lel Smits: And David, when it comes to scaling these enterprise solutions and also the adoption, we’ve clearly got growing demand from regulated industries, including financial services, healthcare and government. But what do you think are the key growth drivers for the company over the next few years?
David Keane: So certainly SCX.ai has delivered what we see as Australia’s leading AI inferencing service. And it’s important to talk a bit about that word inferencing.
Now, the AI value chain is becoming more understood by investors. And I think that’s an important part of how they should think about placing their bets in the AI ecosystem. Now, one end of that is what’s called training.
And that’s where you actually go and build an AI model and you sell capacity to hyperscalers and AI labs from overseas, and they’ll come and use the infrastructure that maybe is built. What we wanted to do at SCX is address the other side of that value chain, which is inferencing. Inferencing is a word the industry uses to describe using an AI model.
So every time you chat with a chat bot or you analyse a document or create a picture or a video, that’s inferencing. And we know there is tremendous demand for inferencing here in Australia and, of course, around the region. So our system is built to maximise the performance for every unit of energy that we put into the system, and to do that without needing water cooling.
And that is a significant environmental benefit for Australia. But it also enables us to achieve what we see as strong unit economics to power our business. And that’s the foundation of SCX.ai.
Lel Smits: David, thank you for the introduction to SCX.ai and look forward to seeing that debut on ASX soon.
David Keane: Thank you so much.
Ends