TRO | Anthropic Makes Its Biggest Asia-Pacific Push Yet

Plus, Huawei Brings Its Next Chip Forward By Six Months and Nvidia Is In Talks To Anchor Anthropic's IPO With US$10 Billion

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Meliora Company
September 21, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

 Subscribe | 21st September, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. Anthropic Makes Its Biggest Asia-Pacific Push Yet

Anthropic has signed a long-term lease as the primary tenant of the Western Downs Digital Park, a planned US$21.5 billion hyperscale data centre campus near Dalby in western Queensland, announced by Premier David Crisafulli in parliament on Wednesday. The facility, built by Singapore-based Zerra DC across 725 hectares, will be Australia's largest data centre, drawing as much power as 1.5 million average Australian homes, with phased operations beginning in 2027. On the same day, Anthropic announced it will open its first Southeast Asia office in Singapore in October. Australia and Singapore are the top two countries globally by Claude usage per capita across 121 countries.

Here’s why this matters: This is Anthropic's first major infrastructure commitment in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia offers energy security, a streamlined planning process, and proximity to the growing AI markets of Southeast Asia. For Australia, landing Anthropic as the anchor tenant of its largest ever data centre is a significant signal that the country is positioning itself seriously in the global AI infrastructure race. The scale of the investment, nearly five times the infrastructure budget for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, reflects how central compute is becoming to national economic strategy. For the TMT industry in the region, the Western Downs facility is the clearest indication yet that AI inference infrastructure is moving south.

2. Huawei Brings Its Next AI Chip Forward Six Months

Huawei has accelerated the launch of its Ascend 960DT AI chip from Q3 2027 to Q1 2027, announced at the Huawei Connect conference on Thursday. The chip doubles the performance of its predecessor and forms the core of Huawei's Peerium Computing Architecture, which links processors, memory, storage, and networking into a single large-scale computing system. The Atlas 950 SuperCluster, built on this architecture, can connect up to 256,000 accelerator cards. The announcement comes a week before Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in Washington, with AI chip access central to US-China trade tensions.

Here’s why this matters: US export restrictions have not slowed Huawei's chip ambitions. The decision to pull the 960DT launch forward by six months sends a deliberate signal: China is not waiting for the geopolitical situation to resolve before building its own AI compute stack. For enterprises currently dependent on other hardware, Huawei's Peerium architecture is worth watching closely. The ability to link 256,000 accelerator cards into a single system is directly competitive with Nvidia's own supercluster ambitions. The broader implication is that the AI hardware race is no longer a two-horse contest. China has arrived with its own architecture and its own timeline, and it is accelerating.

3. Nvidia In Talks To Anchor Anthropic’s IPO With US$10 Billion Commitment

Nvidia is in talks to invest up to US$10 billion as an anchor investor in Anthropic's planned IPO, which is targeting a raise of up to US$100 billion at a valuation of around US$2 trillion, potentially the largest public listing in history. The offering is expected to price before the US midterm elections in November. Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate has climbed from US$9 billion at the end of 2025 to US$65 billion by July 2026, with projections of US$190 to US$200 billion by 2028. Neither company has officially confirmed the discussions.

Here’s why this matters: Nvidia anchoring Anthropic's IPO is not a conventional investment. It is a statement of structural dependency made public. Anthropic is already one of Nvidia's largest customers, having committed to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity on Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. A US$10 billion anchor stake deepens that relationship and gives Nvidia a financial interest in Anthropic's commercial success at a moment when several AI labs are building their own chips to reduce Nvidia reliance. For public market investors, the involvement of the world's most valuable semiconductor company as an anchor provides a credibility signal that no traditional institutional investor could match. If the IPO prices at US$2 trillion, Anthropic will debut as one of the most valuable companies on earth.

Meliora Creative Partner Spotlight: Spotwise

The Meliora Company has announced the first partnerships for Meliora Creative, its creative IP arm, with Spotwise joining the line-up. The strategic partnership will open conversations about agentic AI with broadcast groups across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

The partnership builds on Meliora’s three-pillar model across Advisory, Ventures and Creative: helping organisations navigate change, investing in emerging technology, and working alongside founders to build and commercialise new products and intelligent experiences.

Meliora Creative is focused on bringing new ways for media and entertainment to be operated, experienced and commercialised. Read more below.

Join Us At The Future of Media, London

Meliora Company Managing Partner, Clive Dickens, will be in London to discuss how AI-driven digital innovation transforms content creation, amplifies stakeholder value, and can refine growth across the industry.

3-4 November 2026
Kings Place, London

Register your place in London this November to hear him speak.

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

PrismML, a Caltech-founded start-up, has released Bonsai 2, a compressed version of Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B model shrunk to 5.9 gigabytes, small enough to run on a PC or high-end smartphone, with 98% benchmark performance parity retained. The original Bonsai model has been downloaded 11 million times since March. PrismML is rumoured to be in talks with Apple.

Lovable has acquired Sutro to make vibe-coded software easier to understand and trust. Sutro spent five years building a language and compiler that made application behaviour and rules explicit, designed for security and reliability. The acquisition gives Lovable deeper technical expertise in making AI-built software legible to the people running it - not just the people who built it.

Thatch, a health benefits platform that lets employers fund individual insurance choices rather than a single company-wide plan, has raised US$108 million at a US$1 billion valuation. ARR grew approximately seven times in the past 17 months. Employers set a fixed health budget per worker; employees then choose from dozens of plans on Thatch's AI-powered marketplace.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.