Investors continue to pour astonishing levels of capital into Sydney-founded Firmus Technologies, which has confirmed it’s set to raise another US$505 million (A$725m) at an A$8 billion valuation.
In a carefully worded statement released Tuesday morning after news of the latest investment leaked, Firmus said it “expects to secure a further USD$505 million strategic equity investment led by [New York AI investor] Coatue… with participation from [chip maker] Nvidia subject to certain closing conditions”.
The fresh capital comes just weeks after Firmus raised $100m at a $6bn valuation.
Firmus is looking to go public on the local bourse this year, having engaged major global investment banks for an IPO roadshow. This is reportedly its final raise as a private company, although another A$3 billion raise has been mooted as part of the ASX listing – more than the total market cap of 2024’s Guzman y Gomez listing.
Founded in Sydney in 2019 by Oliver Curtis, Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee, Firmus was originally focused on bitcoin mining. As the AI boom gathered momentum, the now Singapore-based company pivoted to what it calls “green AI factories” with “a new kind of infrastructure designed specifically to meet the needs of energy intensive AI computing workloads – with a focus on energy efficiency, high performance, and sustainability”, building partnerships with CDC Data Centres and Nvidia.
APAC ambitions
Firmus says the new funds will support the rapid deployment of its “AI infrastructure platform, based on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX reference design, across the Asia-Pacific region”, as well as its A$73 billion “Project Southgate” in several capital cities around Australia “to meet rising demand for energy-efficient AI infrastructure from hyperscale, enterprise, and sovereign customers”.
The company’s secret sauce is a cheaper, lower energy way to cool the processing stacks using less water – key environmental concerns amid the broader political push for Australia to be a global data centre hub.
From an initial partnership with the Tasmanian government to build an “AI factory” in Launceston using renewable energy – the project is currently a concrete slab amid major earthworks, according to photos released today – Firmus subsequently announced “Project Southgate”.
For comparison, AWS, a subsidiary of the Amazon, generating global revenue of US$128.7bn and operating income of US$45.6 billion, plans to spend spend less that a third of A$73.3bn ambition Firmus has, committing A$20bn (US$13.9bn) to build data centres in Australia last June.
Yet the lure of possibility has seen investors pile into Firmus hoping AI centres are the new Bendigo goldfields.
Big bucks, small change globally
In that respect, the business is not unique. As Crunchbase pointed out last week, in the first quarter of 2026, the total invested in startups was nearly 70% of all the VC funding deployed in 2025. But amid US$300bn handed out to 6000 startups in the March quarter, nearly two-thirds (US$188bn) went to just four companies – OpenAI (US$122bn), Anthropic (US$30bn), Elon Musk’s xAI (US$20bn) and Alphabet (Google) autonomous vehicle subsidiary Waymo ($16bn).
In that context, while the money slung a Firmus appears massive at a local level – nearly $2 billion in six months is similar to the total Blackbird has raised across six funds in 14 years – it’s the global equivalent of $5 each way in the Melbourne Cup.
Yet it’s still breathtaking.
In just six months since last September, having not yet built an operational data centres to generate income (its Melbourne “factory” is set to open shortly), Firmus has seen its valuation increase by 400% since banking A$330m in a deal with Nvidia (a key supporter of Sam Altman’s OpenAI).
Just two months later, in mid-November, Firmus raised $500 million at a $6 billion valuation.
This latest investment is expected to take the total raised to US$1.35 billion (A$1.95bn) at a post-money US$5.5bn (A$7.95bn) valuation.
Curtis, the co-CEO and husband of publicist Roxy Jacenko, found notoriety a decade ago when, as a 30-year-old stockbroker, he was sentenced to imprisonment for two years for an insider trading scam with a friend that netted them $1.43 million. He served 12 months in NSW gaols before being released in 2017.
He went to on to initially invest A$250,000 in Firmus, which, by 2024, was valued at a modest $81 million. Curtis is now potentially a billionaire on paper. Many others are hoping his good fortunes rub off on them too.
Curtis said the new deal “reinforces Australia’s role in global AI infrastructure while accelerating our Asia-Pacific growth strategy. Project Southgate provides a strong foundation for exporting efficient AI compute globally, and our experience in Singapore gives us a proven blueprint for scaling across Southeast Asia”.
Coatue’s head of AI infrastructure, Robert Yin, said: “Firmus is closing that gap with an energy-efficient AI Factory model purpose-built for next-generation compute at a global scale”.
And the public float of Firmus will test the broader appetite for data centre businesses in Australia amid a growing pushback , whatever they’re called.
