AI development company for Wollongong steel manufacturing, Port Kembla logistics, UoW research, and Illawarra healthcare.

We do not operate a Wollongong office. Aiinfox runs from our Mohali, India HQ and a Frisco, TX office. For Wollongong clients we deliver with a clean afternoon AEST/AEDT overlap from Mohali (9am IST is 1:30pm AEST winter / 2:30pm AEDT summer). For on-site engagements at the BlueScope Springhill Road site, Port Kembla, the UoW iC Innovation Campus, the UoW Wollongong campus, Wollongong Hospital, or the Shellharbour Hospital (kickoff, milestone reviews, security walk-throughs), we travel to Wollongong on a scheduled cadence rather than maintaining a sub-scale local presence.

Carefully and explicitly. For BlueScope Port Kembla and Illawarra heavy-manufacturing engagements where the data is commercial-confidential — proprietary furnace recipes, process-control IP, MES and SCADA telemetry, energy-consumption optimisation models, supplier and customer terms, product-certification IP — the engagement defaults to source-available delivery (your repo, your IP) with self-hosted Llama 3 on vLLM inside the customer's Australian VPC where the process-IP posture requires zero third-party inference. For ISO and product-certification documentation where the documents are intended for external audit, document intelligence on managed inference endpoints is supported. Audit logs capture every prompt and tool call against the trade-secret boundary, and we are explicit on the first call about which classes of data can transit a managed inference API and which cannot.

No — and we are explicit about that on the first call. For BlueScope's plate-steel supply to the Hunter Class frigate program (BAE Systems Australia, Adelaide build) and the Hobart Class destroyer-legacy supply chain, BlueScope itself sits inside the broader defence-prime governance structure with its own security clearances and IRAP-assessed environments. The engagement scope where Aiinfox can credibly deliver is the commercial-confidential layer above SECRET — materials traceability, supply-schedule data, quality records at commercial-confidential scope. For SECRET-classified scope or DTCA-controlled (Defence Trade Controls Act 2012) technical data, Aiinfox is a foreign engineering provider without Australian security clearances and that is outside what we credibly deliver. We will recommend an IRAP-assessed Australian delivery prime where the contract structure requires it.

Yes. Our engagement defaults are aligned with the Privacy Act 1988, the 13 Australian Privacy Principles, and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. NSW PPIPA governs NSW public-sector personal information generally — relevant for NSW Government-adjacent and Wollongong Council-adjacent engagements. NSW HRIPA (the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002) governs health information handling in NSW and is relevant for Illawarra Shoalhaven Health-adjacent and Wollongong Hospital-adjacent healthtech. We map all three regimes into the engagement DPA, run a Privacy Impact Assessment for engagements processing personal information at scale, and structure data flows so NSW personal information remains in Australia through every step of the pipeline including inference.

Same senior engineers, but a different engagement shape. Sydney engagements lean into enterprise-financial-services in the CBD, North Sydney media, and the broader Sydney scaleup mix. Wollongong engagements are more industrial — BlueScope steel manufacturing, Port Kembla logistics, Illawarra hydrogen-and-renewable-energy transition, UoW iC research scaleups, Illawarra Shoalhaven Health-adjacent healthtech. The eval discipline is the same. The compliance baseline (Privacy Act, NSW PPIPA, NSW HRIPA) is the same. The price reflects the buyer — Wollongong rates are tuned for Illawarra Region procurement cycles rather than Sydney CBD premiums, with a typical 30 to 50 percent rate-card difference for equivalent scope.

Yes. The iC (innovation Campus) at North Wollongong is one of the most concentrated research-startup ecosystems outside Sydney CBD and hosts UoW-affiliated scaleups across AI/ML, materials science, smart infrastructure, biotech, and defence-and-aerospace. The value we bring to an iC-adjacent scaleup is the production engineering layer between research artefact and product — typed-tool-call agents, structured-extraction pipelines, eval harnesses, observability, guardrails, and the hand-off documentation that gets the system to a real user while UoW-trained researchers get back to research. We are explicit that we are not UoW-affiliated, we do not publish at NeurIPS, and we are not a research lab. If your engagement genuinely needs a research-lab partner with publication output, we will recommend a UoW industry-partnership engagement instead.

Your call. AWS ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) is the geographically immediate AU primary region for Wollongong (Sydney is roughly 90 minutes' drive north), with full AWS service coverage including Bedrock for Claude inference. AWS ap-southeast-4 (Melbourne) is the alternative. Azure Australia East (Sydney) and Australia Central (Canberra) are supported. GCP australia-southeast1 (Sydney) is the standard GCP option. For BlueScope process-IP and defence-supply-chain commercial-confidential engagements, we self-host Llama 3 on vLLM inside your Sydney VPC for zero third-party inference.

Most v1 engagements at Aiinfox land between AUD 35,000 and AUD 160,000 fixed-price for a focused build — an AI agent, a RAG system, a voice pipeline, a computer-vision pipeline, or a bespoke ML model. Larger multi-quarter engagements with fine-tuning, BlueScope-grade industrial process-optimisation ML, defence-supply-chain commercial-confidential work, or NSW HRIPA-aligned healthcare work typically reach AUD 200,000 to AUD 400,000. Pilots are usually AUD 12,000 to AUD 28,000 with acceptance criteria written into scope. Wollongong clients invoice in AUD via bank transfer or USD by preference. Cost difference versus a Sydney CBD consultancy is roughly 40 to 60 percent on senior rates.