Firmus, an Australian AI infrastructure company, has raised $2 billion in equity funding, pushing its valuation above $10.5 billion, the company announced on August 7, 2026.
The deal
The round drew follow-on investment from Nvidia and Coatue Management, plus new backing from Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and trading firm Jane Street. It brings Firmus’s total equity raised over the past year past $3 billion and nearly doubles the roughly $5.5 billion valuation the company held after its previous round in April, according to its statement.
Firmus builds AI factories — large data centers purpose-built to train and run AI models — using Nvidia’s DSX AI Factory reference architecture together with its own HyperCube compute platform and grid-aware cooling software, the company said.
Project Southgate and beyond
The capital will accelerate Project Southgate, Firmus’s AI-factory rollout across Australia, and fund early expansion into other Asia-Pacific markets including Indonesia, according to the announcement. Sydney-based Firmus builds its pitch around efficiency — “energy in and tokens out” — using proprietary cooling technology to keep data centers running as regional power grids strain under AI demand.
Blackstone senior managing director John Watson called AI infrastructure “a foundational driver of global growth,” while Firmus co-CEO Oliver Curtis said the funding lets the company “move on multiple fronts at once” toward what he described as one of the world’s leading AI infrastructure platforms.
Why it matters
The round adds to a wave of capital flowing into AI data centers outside the United States, as chipmakers and investors race to secure compute capacity closer to Asian markets. A similar dynamic has already played out at Armenia’s Eleveight AI factory, which sold out its capacity within a month of opening — a sign that demand for regional AI compute is outrunning supply even outside the traditional US hubs.