Australian AI infrastructure company Firmus Technologies has raised $2 billion in new equity at a valuation above $10.5 billion, nearly doubling its worth in four months as investors pour money into the physical plants that run artificial intelligence.
The round was backed by Coatue Management, Nvidia, Blackstone vehicles and Jane Street, the Sydney-based company said Friday. New money will speed up the next phase of Project Southgate, its flagship AI factory rollout in Australia, and fund early work on a huge AI campus in Batam, Indonesia that could hold up to 170,000 Nvidia accelerators.
The raise is one of the biggest in the AI infrastructure sector this year, and it shows how fast capital is chasing companies that turn chips, power and buildings into cloud capacity. It also gives Firmus a war chest big enough to run multiple projects at once instead of finishing one and starting the next.
From $5.5 billion to $10.5 billion in four months
Firmus completed an April round, led by Coatue, that valued the company at $5.5 billion. Friday's financing pushes the post-money valuation past $10.5 billion and lifts total equity raised over the past year to more than $3 billion.
Co-CEO Oliver Curtis said the backing lets the company advance several projects simultaneously as demand for AI compute keeps climbing. Firmus expects customers across Asia-Pacific to need far more training and inference capacity in the next few years, and the new money is a bet that its build-out can meet them.
The valuation climb is steep even by the standards of this market. Firmus's April round, which also drew Coatue, priced the company at $5.5 billion. Friday's funding adds roughly $2 billion on top and pushes the post-money figure past $10.5 billion, Reuters reported, a near-doubling in four months. Few private infrastructure companies have moved that fast.
Existing backers did not just hold their positions, they added. Coatue grew its stake in this round, Nvidia stayed in as an investor, and Blackstone Tactical Opportunities joined alongside other Blackstone entities and trading firm Jane Street. Each of those names has been writing bigger checks for data-center builders through 2026, and Firmus is now one of their bigger bets in the region.
The firm says most of the fresh capital stays in Australia for now, with region-wide growth planned in stages. The manufacturing line in Australia that builds its HyperCube platform gives it a faster, more repeatable deployment path, and the company argues that edge is exactly why it can build where hyperscalers move slower.
Batam: a 360-megawatt AI campus 20 kilometers from Singapore
The eye-catching part of the plan is Indonesia. Firmus announced in June that it will build a 360-megawatt AI factory campus in Batam, roughly 20 kilometers from Singapore across the Malacca Strait, with up to 170,000 Nvidia AI accelerators.
The site is being developed with DayOne, a Singapore-headquartered digital infrastructure company. It combines Nvidia's DSX full-stack AI factory platform with Firmus's own HyperCube liquid-cooled architecture, a system designed in Australia to run dense GPU pods more efficiently. The full details are laid out in Firmus's announcement, and Reuters covered the June deal at the time.
The campus is set to go live in the first quarter of 2027. Nvidia's chip agreement covers Grace-Blackwell, Vera-Rubin and Vera platforms through 2027 and 2028, so the first wave of machines in Batam will be the same generation the hyperscalers are installing right now.
Committed offtake agreements for the first six years are projected at $25 billion to $30 billion, according to the company. The Batam campus is also meant to serve a different buyer than Firmus's Australian plants: AI-native startups, enterprises and software vendors instead of large cloud providers.
A long-term financing structure in which Nvidia shares the cloud revenue
The Batam partnership is structured around a revenue-share model. Firmus buys Nvidia gear and sells cloud services built on it; Nvidia gets both standard product revenue and a slice of the cloud revenue generated by the capacity it supplied.
Firmus technology co-CEO Tim Rosenfield told Reuters the setup is meant to level a playing field that has favored the largest cloud buyers. Big tech companies with strong credit ratings can sign huge compute contracts and walk into a data center; startups generally cannot. The structure gives smaller AI firms a way to buy capacity on terms that have historically only been available to the biggest buyers.
The same template shows up across the industry in the past few weeks. Anthropic signed a $10 billion, six-year computing deal with Volta Infra, a seven-month-old Nvidia-backed startup, for a 133 MW hydro-powered site in Norway built with Bitdeer. Banks are preparing to sell down $15 billion of debt tied to a Google-backed Anthropic campus in Texas, the Financial Times reported. In every case, an AI lab signs a long off-take with an infrastructure newcomer, and Nvidia sits somewhere behind the deal to keep the supply chain moving. Volta itself emerged from stealth the same day it announced the Anthropic contract, having raised $300 million at a $2.4 billion valuation.
The crypto-to-AI conversion wave keeps paying
Bitdeer, the partner running Volta's Norwegian data center, began as a bitcoin mining company. It is now one of several miners who redirect facilities and power contracts toward AI workloads that pay more per watt and sign multi-year leases.
Firmus pulled in the same direction of equity capital. Its HyperCube architecture is built on Nvidia's DSX AI Factory reference design, and the company claims the integration lowers cost per token while bringing capacity online faster. For Nvidia, these partnerships serve as a distribution channel: every new AI factory it licenses a chip plant with, the larger the wall-to-wall deployment it can guarantee for its newest products.
The build-out is not cheap. Construction costs for AI-optimized data centers have climbed to $20 million per megawatt or more as liquid cooling and high-density power distribution become mandatory. A 360 MW campus at that rate implies billions of dollars of spending before the first rack is loaded, which is why companies like Firmus and Volta are stacking equity round after equity round while off-take contracts lock in customers ahead of the build.
Firmus's HyperCube platform is part of that cost fight. The architecture, co-designed to Nvidia DSX blueprints, uses liquid cooling to pack more GPUs into each hall and claims to improve tokens per watt over air-cooled designs. The company builds the systems at its Australian manufacturing line, which shortens the supply chain versus importing complete pods. It also inked a deal with CDC Data Centers last year targeting up to 1.6 gigawatts of Nvidia-powered capacity across Australia with a 2028 completion horizon, so the Batam project sits inside a much larger pipeline.
What it means for the region
The Batam location is deliberate. Singapore is one of the most constrained markets in the world for new data center capacity, and Batam sits close enough to act as a overflow site with more land and easier access to power. If the campus hits the first quarter of 2027 target, Indonesia becomes a real node in the region's AI compute map rather than a place that only hosts crypto farms.
For Firmus, the next 12 months are about execution: Project Southgate's next phases in Australia, early Batam construction and a possible IPO. People familiar with the matter told Reuters investment banks have been hired to explore a listing, though the company declined to comment. Rosenfield, speaking about a possible initial public offering, offered no comment.
The company line is that infrastructure demand still outruns supply in Asia-Pacific, and that enterprise and government buyers want options beyond the global hyperscalers. With $2 billion more in the bank and Nvidia standing behind the purchase platform, Firmus is betting it can be one of those options.
That is a big debt to fund and a bigger one to finish. The region is filling up with GPU capacity at a time when some analysts wonder whether AI demand can keep pace with the build. But for the Indonesian market specifically, one thing looks close to certain: the largest AI factory in the region is being built 20 kilometers from Singapore, and it is slated to start accepting racks before the first quarter of 2027 is out.
See more coverage in our Cloud & Edge Computing section, and read earlier analysis on why data center buildouts are outrunning the power grid.