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Firmus said last August 7 that it raised $2 billion in a strategic equity round, lifting its post-money valuation to more than $10.5 billion. That is nearly double the $5.5 billion valuation it announced after an April funding round.
The round included follow-on investments from Nvidia and Coatue Management, while funds managed by Blackstone and trading firm Jane Street also participated. According to the company, Firmus has raised more than $3 billion in equity over the past 12 months.
The funding comes as investors continue pouring money into the physical infrastructure needed to run increasingly demanding AI models, even as concerns grow over the huge sums being spent on AI. Firmus plans to use the new money to accelerate Project Southgate, its initiative to build AI training and inference infrastructure across Australia and expand into other Asia-Pacific markets.
“This investment allows us to move on multiple fronts at once. We’re scaling across Australia while fast-tracking our capacity to expand into the wider Asia-Pacific region, including the early steps behind our recently announced Indonesia development that will serve AI-native customers,” said Firmus Co-CEO Oliver Curtis.
The company is developing a 90-megawatt data center in Launceston, Tasmania, and has outlined plans for a larger 288-megawatt campus on the island. It is also working with CDC to add capacity on mainland Australia and is targeting about 1.6 gigawatts of infrastructure by 2028, according to Data Center Dynamics.
Firmus has also announced plans to develop a 360-megawatt Nvidia DSX AI factory campus in Batam, Indonesia, designed to support up to 170,000 Nvidia AI accelerators.
Nvidia partnership strengthens position
Firmus is building infrastructure around Nvidia’s DSX AI Factory Reference Architecture. The companies reached an agreement in June under which Firmus would purchase Nvidia infrastructure and provide Nvidia-powered cloud services.
Jane Street’s participation adds a global trading firm to an investor group that includes major technology and alternative-asset companies.
“As AI models become larger and more capable, access to reliable, high-performance compute becomes increasingly important,” Daniel Pontecorvo, head of physical engineering at Jane Street, said in a statement. “Firmus is helping build the infrastructure needed to support that next generation of AI.”
The bigger bet on AI infrastructure
Firmus’ rapid valuation increase reflects a broader shift in AI investing: the bottleneck is increasingly not just software, but the data centers, GPUs, electricity and cooling systems required to operate them.
That creates an opportunity for specialized infrastructure companies such as Firmus, but it also raises the stakes. Building AI factories requires enormous upfront spending, while demand must remain strong enough to keep expensive computing equipment productive.
Founded in 2019, Firmus initially focused on cryptocurrency and high-performance computing before shifting toward AI infrastructure, according to Data Center Dynamics. Its earlier work included immersion cooling for dense computing workloads, while the company says its Australian projects are designed to take advantage of renewable energy resources.
The new funding gives Firmus substantially more capital to expand. Still, the company's next challenge will be turning that capital into operating AI capacity fast enough to justify its rapidly rising valuation.
Related reading: As Firmus expands conventional AI infrastructure across Asia-Pacific, Google and SpaceX are exploring a more unconventional approach: solar-powered data centers in space.