What good are thousands of powerful GPUs if the power grid cannot provide enough electricity for it to run?
Firmus is betting it has an answer. The Australian AI infrastructure company has raised $2 billion from Nvidia, Blackstone, Coatue and other investors to expand a network of AI factories across Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region, which will be designed around high-density computing, liquid cooling and real-time coordination with power grids.
The raise gives Firmus a post-money valuation above $10.5 billion and takes its new equity raised over the past year above $3 billion.
For a company that began as a Bitcoin miner before moving into data centers and AI infrastructure, the scale of the latest funding shows how quickly demand for AI computing is changing the economics of data center development.
The Power Problem Is Central To The Plan
Firmus is building its infrastructure around a combination of liquid cooling, modular construction, and software designed to coordinate computing demand with electricity networks.
Its HyperCube platform houses high-density GPU racks in primarily liquid-cooled configurations, with the company saying the system is designed to remove heat more efficiently than traditional air cooling while using minimal water. Firmus is also developing software with Nvidia that can coordinate AI workloads with grid conditions in real time.
This matters because AI factories can require hundreds of megawatts of electricity. For example, Firmus’ proposed Bell Bay facility in Tasmania is designed to draw about 288MW, and the company says the site will be dispatchable, which will, in turn, allow it to reduce electricity consumption during periods of energy scarcity or grid constraints.
The approach is also being tested through Project Southgate, Firmus’ Australian AI infrastructure program, with the aim for it to reach 1.6GW of capacity by 2028.
Australia Is Only The Beginning
The new capital will accelerate Southgate while funding Firmus’ expansion into other Asia-Pacific markets. This includes Indonesia, where Firmus and Nvidia announced plans in June for a 360MW AI Factory campus in Batam containing 170,000 GPUs. The facility will combine Nvidia’s DSX AI Factory architecture with Firmus’ HyperCube liquid-cooling platform.
Firmus has also formerly secured major demand for its Australian infrastructure. In March, it announced a multibillion-dollar agreement with a global technology company for approximately 18,400 Nvidia GB300 GPUs at a Melbourne facility.
This funding, therefore, arrives with projects, customers, and infrastructure plans already taking shape. Nvidia’s continued backing also gives Firmus access to the chipmaker’s AI Factory architecture as it tries to build facilities where computing capacity, cooling, and electricity management are designed as one system.
The bigger test now is execution. Firmus has raised the capital to build at a scale few Australian AI infrastructure companies can match. Now its major challenge is to turn that money into operating GPU capacity across multiple markets while delivering on its promise of infrastructure that can work within the limits of the power grid.
