Maincode has announced a $30 million investment to build what it calls Australia’s most advanced AI factory, a new facility in Melbourne set to open in January 2026.
The project, known internally as MC-2, marks the next phase in the company’s goal to make Australian-made AI competitive on the world stage. The facility will focus on creating advanced, task-specific AI models engineered to handle structured and rule-based workloads that large, general-purpose language models often struggle with.
The announcement follows the success of MC-1, which produced Matilda—Maincode’s first fully built and trained large language model. Co-founder and CEO Dave Lemphers said the new factory signals a step forward in precision-focused AI development.
“MC-2 is more than an expansion, it’s a statement of belief,” said Lemphers. “We’re not chasing size for its own sake. We’re building advanced, focused models that actually work, models built with the precision, efficiency, and practicality that define Australian Engineering.”
At the heart of the new facility will be a high-performance compute and storage infrastructure powered by AMD. The system combines AMD Instinct MI355 accelerators, AMD EPYC 9575F server CPUs, and AMD ROCm software to support both training and inference processes within an integrated environment.
Peter Chambers, Senior Director, OEM Sales, APJ and Country Manager, Australia at AMD, said the partnership supports a broader goal to enable AI innovation across industries. “At AMD, we have a bold vision to enable AI everywhere, bringing open, high-performance computing to developers, start-ups, and enterprises around the world,” he said. “With our latest generations of GPUs, CPUs, and software stacks, MC-2 is designed to deliver frontier AI performance with exceptional energy efficiency. We’re proud to support Maincode in driving locally led innovation with global reach and to help advance Australia’s AI ecosystem.”
For Maincode, the investment is about moving beyond the limits of prompt engineering. Many of its clients began experimenting with off-the-shelf models, only to find that precision and control were hard to achieve. MC-2 aims to provide them with an alternative—a space where purpose-built models can be developed and refined for specific operational needs.
“Anyone who’s spent time trying to prompt-engineer a general-purpose model to follow complex rules or logic knows the limits,” Lemphers said. “That’s where we come in. MC-2 lets us build and operate specialised models from the ground up, custom-built to handle the exact decision-making and reasoning tasks our customers need, without the guesswork.”
Lemphers said the first factory was built out of necessity and the second will build on that foundation. “We built our first factory because we needed to. We wanted AI that could think and reason in the ways businesses actually work. MC-2 is the next evolution, a place where we can build those models faster, smarter, and at scale.”
The new factory will integrate research, data, compute, and deployment within one controlled environment—a foundation for continuous AI creation and improvement. It will power the next generation of Matilda models, customer-specific systems, and applied AI research programs managed end-to-end by Maincode.
Lemphers described MC-2 as part of a shift toward “agentic AI”—systems that can reason, plan, and take action within defined boundaries. “What we’re building with MC-2 is capability,” he said. “We’re using the best technology in the world and applying it with Australian inventiveness. We’re not a chatbot company, we’re an AI company that builds entirely new models from scratch, systems designed to handle the work that general-purpose models can’t, no matter how much prompt engineering you try. MC-2 isn’t about scale, it’s about precision. It’s where the next generation of useful, usable AI gets made.”
The $30 million investment is one of the largest private AI infrastructure commitments in Australia, signalling confidence in the country’s ability to lead in applied intelligence and model engineering.
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