Nvidia-backed Firmus hits $5.5B valuation with $505M raise, eyes $2B ASX IPO in June

Firmus, the 'Southgate' AI datacenter builder backed by Nvidia, hits $5.5B valuation | TechCrunch

Asia AI data center provider Firmus on Monday announced a fresh $505 million raise led by Coatue at a $5.5 billion post money valuation. With this round, Firmus has raised $1.35 billion in six months, it says. The Singapore-based data center company previously raised AU$330 million (approximately $215 million) at an AU$1.85 billion ($1.2 billion) valuation from investors, including Nvidia. Firmus is developing an energy-efficient "AI factory" network of data centers in Australia and Tasmania, a project it dubs Project Southgate. It is using Nvidia's reference designs for building these efficient data centers. These new data centers will use Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform -- the chip giant's next-gen AI computing system succeeding its Blackwell architecture, expected to ship in the second-half of 2026. Firmus originally provided cooling technologies for Bitcoin mining and has become yet-another crypto-roots-turned-AI provider company that investors love.

Nvidia-Backed Data Center Builder Firmus Raises $505 Million

Data center builder Firmus Technologies Pty raised $505 million in an investment round led by Coatue Management LLC, part of a global push to finance artificial intelligence infrastructure. The deal values the Australian startup at $5.5 billion, Firmus said Thursday. Nvidia Corp., the top maker of AI accelerator chips, also participated in the round. The cash will go toward rapidly deploying AI hardware based on forthcoming Nvidia computer technology in the Asia-Pacific region. Firmus, which has data center projects in Australia and Singapore, has raised $1.35 billion in the last six months, including this latest transaction. Firmus is leading an effort called Southgate, a plan to build data center capacity in Australia that runs on renewable energy, starting with a site in Tasmania. That facility will house computers based on 36,000 Nvidia accelerator chips after its first two rounds of technology deployments. The powerful processors help develop and run AI models by bombarding them with data. Nvidia, often in partnership with venture capital investors, has invested billions of dollars in AI companies. It's aiming to help cultivate an industry that has already fueled explosive sales growth and turned Nvidia into the world's most valuable business. As with the Firmus funding, Nvidia is backing companies that also buy its products. Some investors have expressed concern about the circular nature of these deals, something Nvidia has pushed back on. Coatue, which has more than $70 billion in assets under management, has made its own push into AI technology. The New York-based investment firm has backed computing infrastructure as well as service providers like OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Firmus is using Vera Rubin DSX, a design provided by Nvidia for building what it calls AI factories. Vera Rubin is the code name for a new generation of chips and computers that Nvidia will begin shipping in the second half of this year. The Australian effort dovetails with a push by Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang into what's called sovereign AI, the building of local data centers that allow countries and companies to keep their information within national boundaries. Huang has touted that as a key area of growth for his company's technology. Firmus said previously that the Southgate project has attracted a global hyperscaler customer -- a term used to describe the largest cloud computing companies. Blackstone Inc., the world's biggest alternative-asset manager, also has helped finance the effort.

Nvidia-backed Firmus targets $2bn ASX IPO after $505m raise and $10bn Blackstone debt

In short: Australian AI data centre company Firmus has raised $505m at a $5.5bn valuation in what it says is its final pre-IPO round, and is now targeting a $2bn listing on the ASX in June or July, backed by a $10bn Blackstone-led debt facility secured in February and a plan to deploy 1.6 gigawatts of liquid-cooled AI compute across Australia by 2028. Firmus Technologies, the Nvidia-backed Australian company building what it calls AI Factories powered by renewable energy, has raised $505m in new equity at a $5.5bn valuation ahead of an anticipated initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange later this year. The raise, announced on 6 April 2026 and led by Coatue Management with continued participation from Nvidia, is the third equity round Firmus has completed in six months, bringing total equity raised in that period to approximately $1.35bn. The IPO, expected in June or July, would seek to raise an additional $2bn and, if completed at that scale, would rank among the largest technology listings in Australian history. Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgans Financial, and Morgan Stanley are conducting a non-deal roadshow with potential investors this week in preparation. Firmus's flagship asset is Project Southgate, a $4.5bn initial construction programme centred on a purpose-built campus in Launceston, in northern Tasmania. The site has been designed as a campus of modular, fully liquid-cooled AI Factories built to run Nvidia's GPU clusters at high density, and will eventually house 36,000 Nvidia GB300 Grace Blackwell chips. Its first stage, delivering 90 megawatts of AI infrastructure, is targeted for completion in 2026. The Tasmanian location is not incidental. The island state runs on a grid that is overwhelmingly powered by hydroelectric generation, giving Firmus a credible claim to a low-carbon compute footprint that most data centre operators cannot match. The company says its liquid-cooling technology reduces energy consumption by up to 60% compared with conventional air-cooled facilities and cuts construction costs by roughly half. Those metrics, if they hold at scale, make a material difference to the economics of large AI training runs, which are among the most power-intensive industrial processes currently operating. Project Southgate is planned to expand beyond Tasmania into a national network, with sites in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Perth bringing total capacity to 1.6 gigawatts across five Australian locations by 2028. The full programme, developed alongside Nvidia and listed data centre operator CDC Data Centres, carries a projected build cost of $73.3bn, a figure that reflects both the capital intensity of AI infrastructure and the ambition of the national rollout. Equity is only part of the financial architecture supporting Firmus's buildout. In February 2026, the company closed a $10bn debt financing facility led by funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Blackstone Credit & Insurance, with additional support from Coatue. The deal is one of the largest private credit transactions in Australian history and was structured as long-dated infrastructure debt, a format that reflects both the bankability of contracted AI data centre assets and private credit's appetite for exposure to the AI infrastructure cycle. The proceeds are being deployed to fund the national expansion of Project Southgate. Kirkland & Ellis advised Blackstone on the transaction. The $10bn facility, combined with the equity raised across six months, gives Firmus a funded position that is unusually robust for a company of its age and public profile, and positions it to break ground on multiple sites simultaneously ahead of the IPO. The scale of private credit committed to AI infrastructure has become one of the defining features of the current investment cycle, reflecting the same underlying logic that drove SoftBank's $40bn bridge loan to fund its OpenAI commitment: the demand for compute is growing faster than any company can fund it from equity alone, and institutional lenders are willing to provide long-dated capital against contracted revenue streams from hyperscalers and AI labs. Nvidia's role in Firmus is unusual: it is both a strategic investor and the primary chip supplier for every facility the company builds. Nvidia joined as an investor at Firmus's $330m raise in late 2025, at which point the company's valuation stood at $1.9bn. The $505m raise values the company at $5.5bn, a near-threefold increase in roughly six months. Nvidia's investment represents an alignment of incentives: the faster Firmus builds, the more GB300 systems Nvidia ships. Project Southgate runs on Nvidia's DSX reference architecture, a deployment standard that Nvidia developed specifically for high-density AI compute environments. Nvidia's expanding position as the infrastructure layer beneath most frontier AI compute, whether through its own hardware or through the partners it strategically backs, is a theme that runs through the entire AI infrastructure buildout. Nvidia's enterprise AI platform continues to deepen that integration at the software and enterprise layer, making the GPU maker progressively harder to displace even as custom silicon from Google and Broadcom gains market share at the largest AI labs. Firmus was co-founded in 2019 by Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield, and Jonathan Levee. Curtis and Rosenfield serve as co-CEOs. The company is incorporated in Singapore, where Curtis relocated in 2023 with his family. Curtis is a notable figure in the Australian business press for reasons beyond the data centre sector. He was convicted of insider trading in 2016 and served a custodial sentence, before re-emerging as an investor and eventually co-founding Firmus. Curtis initially invested $250,000 in the company; at Firmus's latest valuation that stake is worth considerably more. His profile adds an unusual dimension to what would otherwise be a straightforward infrastructure company IPO narrative, Australian financial media coverage of the listing is likely to reflect both the scale of the business and the personal story of one of its founders. Firmus's origins are also worth noting: the company began as a cooling technology provider serving bitcoin mining operations before pivoting to AI data centres. That pivot, from crypto infrastructure to AI compute, is a trajectory shared by a number of capital-intensive technology businesses that found a far larger market in AI than they had in cryptocurrency. Firmus is the most capitalised example of a broader trend: the emergence of Australia as a serious destination for AI infrastructure investment. The country's combination of renewable energy resources, political stability, an English-speaking workforce, and proximity to the Asia-Pacific market has attracted significant capital. NEXTDC, the listed Australian data centre operator, secured A$6.4bn in debt facilities in 2025 and is developing a hyperscale AI campus in Sydney in partnership with OpenAI. The Australian government released national expectations for data centre and AI infrastructure developers in March 2026 as part of its broader AI policy framework. The concentration of AI compute in specific geographies, a dynamic driven by energy availability and regulatory environment as much as by commercial preference, is one of the structural shifts that a 2025 recap for tech and AI would have identified as nascent but has now become a capital-allocation reality. Australia, alongside Northern Europe and parts of Southeast Asia, is positioning as a beneficiary of the geographic diversification pressure on AI infrastructure investment, particularly relevant given the disruption to Gulf data centre plans caused by the 2026 Iran conflict. The broader compute arms race is also reflected in deals like Meta's $27bn infrastructure deal with Nebius and the scale of capital commitments flowing into AI infrastructure globally. For Firmus, the question that the IPO will answer is whether public market investors are willing to value a pre-revenue infrastructure developer with contracted assets, an Nvidia partnership, and an ambitious national buildout on the same terms that private credit and equity investors have been applying. At $5.5bn pre-listing with a $2bn raise targeted, the implied post-IPO valuation would position Firmus as one of the most valuable technology companies ever to list in Australia. Whether the ASX can absorb it, and whether public investors share private equity's confidence in the AI infrastructure thesis, will be determined by the time the roadshow concludes. What is already settled is that the capital is committed, the sites are breaking ground, and Tasmania's hydroelectric grid is about to start powering some of the most energy-intensive AI training runs in the southern hemisphere. The question of how governed and sovereign AI infrastructure gets built, who owns it, who controls access to it, and what regulatory frameworks apply, is one that Firmus's listing will force Australian policymakers and investors to confront in real terms for the first time.

Nvidia-backed Firmus raises $505M at $5.5B valuation ahead of ASX IPO - SiliconANGLE

Nvidia Corp.-backed Australian artificial intelligence data center company Firmus Technologies Pty. Ltd. has raised $505 million in new funding on a $5.5 billion valuation ahead of an expected initial public offering on the Australian Stock Exchange later this year. Founded in 2019, Firums develops and operates data center infrastructure designed to support AI workloads that require large-scale, high-density compute environments. Firmus is building facilities designed to accommodate clusters of graphics processing units interconnected through high-speed networking, alongside storage and cooling systems required for sustained workloads. The company's data centers are configured to align with Nvidia-based hardware and software architectures to allow customers to deploy standardized environments for model training and inference. Its power distribution and thermal management systems are designed to support continuous operation under high computational loads. Firums provides access to dedicated compute capacity through managed infrastructure environments, where deployment, configuration and ongoing operation of systems are handled within a single platform. Customers can scale workloads across multiple nodes, with support for both training and inference use cases. The operating model centers on delivering integrated infrastructure that combines compute, networking and facility management. The company is currently building a $1.37 billion flagship campus in the northern Tasmanian town of Launceston. The data center will be designed to be environmentally friendly from the get-go, with water recycling, batteries and power from Tasmania's hydroelectric dams. The Tasmanian site is also expected to host 36,000 of Nvidia Corp.'s top-end GB300 chips. The new funding round was led by Coatue Management, with continued backing from Nvidia, which has maintained an active role as both an investor and a strategic partner. The funding will be used to expand data center capacity, including new facility development, GPU deployment and supporting power and cooling infrastructure required for large-scale AI workloads. The new funding comes after Frimus raised approximately $715 million in 2025, including a round of $327 million in November. According to the Australian Financial Review, the fundraise was the third and final raise ahead of Firmus's IPO, with sources close to the company saying that management was expected to make their maiden pitch to potential IPO investors on Tuesday. The IPO, expected in June or July, would see Firmus seeking to raise around $2 billion in additional capital. Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgans Financial Ltd. and Morgan Stanley are also reported to be introducing the IPO to potential investors via a non-deal roadshow this week. Should the IPO proceed, it will be one of the largest in Australia this decade and one of the largest of all time in the country for a tech company. Other prominent Australian tech companies that have decided to go public have tended to favor non-Australian exchanges, making Firmus a somewhat rare tech company in seeking to float in Australia.

Firmus valuation approaches $7b in fresh Nvidia investment

Artificial intelligence infrastructure start-up Firmus is expected to be valued at nearly $7 billion after the world's biggest company Nvidia doubled its investment in what's slated to be its final capital raising as a private company. Firmus was scrambling to finalise the third and final tranche of its whopper $1 billion-plus pre-IPO raising on Monday night, according to those close to the company who were not authorised to speak publicly. It includes a share sale to Nvidia and other strategic investors, and comes hours before its management make their maiden pitch to potential IPO investors in Asia on Tuesday.

Nvidia-Backed Firmus Raises $505 Million As AI Data Center Boom Accelerates - Blackstone (NYSE:BX), NVIDI

Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) backed Australian AI infrastructure startup Firmus has secured $505 million in fresh equity funding, pushing its valuation to $5.5 billion. AI Infrastructure Demand Drives Fresh Capital The latest funding round was led by Coatue, with participation from Nvidia. The investment remains subject to closing conditions, Nikkei Asia reported on Tuesday. This marks Firmus' third equity raise in six months, bringing total capital raised during that period to $1.35 billion. The funding arrives as the company prepares for a much-anticipated initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) later this year. 'AI Factories' At The Core Of Expansion Strategy Founded in 2019, Firmus develops specialized data centers -- dubbed "AI Factories" -- designed to efficiently run AI workloads. These facilities leverage advanced technologies such as liquid immersion cooling and are built using Nvidia's reference architecture. "This investment reinforces Australia's role in global AI infrastructure while accelerating our Asia-Pacific growth strategy," co-founder and co-CEO Oliver Curtis said. Firmus has already deployed facilities in Singapore through a partnership with ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, backed by Temasek and plans to scale further across Southeast Asia. Project Southgate And Regional Growth Plans A key part of its expansion is Project Southgate, under which Firmus aims to build multiple AI-focused data centers across Australia in collaboration with Nvidia and CDC Data Centres. Initial sites in Melbourne and Tasmania are expected to come online soon. "Project Southgate provides a strong foundation for exporting efficient AI compute globally," Curtis added. Investors Bet On Energy-Efficient AI Scaling Coatue's Robert Yin highlighted the company's efficiency-driven approach, stating Firmus is "closing the gap" between surging AI demand and the infrastructure required to support it. The company is also backed by Blackstone (NYSE:BX), which in February extended $10 billion in debt financing. Price Action: Nvidia shares closed at $177.64 on Monday, up 0.14%, before slipping 0.51% to $176.73 in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro. According to Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings, Nvidia is facing near and mid-term pressure, though it maintains a strong long-term uptrend, backed by a Growth score in the 98th percentile. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo Courtesy: LALAKA on Shutterstock.com Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.