Firmus, an Australian company that pivoted from Bitcoin mining to AI infrastructure, closed a fully subscribed $2 billion equity round that lifts its valuation above $10.5 billion, nearly double where it stood just four months ago.
The round drew follow-on investment from Nvidia and Coatue Management, along with new backing from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and trading firm Jane Street, the company said Friday. Firmus has now raised more than $3 billion in equity over the past year, on top of a separate $10 billion debt-financing facility led by Blackstone secured in February to fund its "Project Southgate" AI-factory build-out.
Firmus builds AI-computing infrastructure rather than models, using Nvidia's DSX AI Factory Reference Architecture and its own "HyperCube" platform. Project Southgate, its roughly $4.5 billion flagship construction program, centers on a fully liquid-cooled campus in Launceston, Tasmania, designed eventually to house 36,000 Nvidia GB300 Grace Blackwell chips. The new capital will fund further expansion across Australia as well as into Indonesia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.
"This investment allows us to move on multiple fronts at once," said Firmus co-chief executive Oliver Curtis. "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."
The raise reflects a broader pattern of former cryptocurrency miners repositioning their power contracts and data-center real estate toward AI infrastructure, as demand for compute capacity has outpaced the industry's ability to build it. With Nvidia both a customer and an investor, Firmus's rapid valuation growth also illustrates how tightly intertwined chipmakers have become with the data-center operators racing to deploy their hardware at scale across the Asia-Pacific region.
Firmus's trajectory — from a Tasmania-based Bitcoin miner to a multi-billion-dollar AI infrastructure operator in the span of a few years — mirrors a broader shift among power-rich, previously crypto-focused operators now competing for a share of the global AI buildout, a trend that has drawn increasing interest from institutional investors such as Blackstone and Jane Street seeking exposure to AI infrastructure without taking model-development risk.